LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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Seven Great Lights 



BY 



REV. KERR B P TUPPER, D. D., 

Pastor First Baptist Church, Denver, 

Author of " Robertson's giving- Thoughts," " Popular Treatise on 

Christian Baptism," " Relation of Baptists to the 

World's Literature." 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION 

BY 

Rev. W. F\ McDowell, D. D. 

Chancellor of the University of Denver. 



. ?&!&< 0I 

CINCINNATI: Q£J 19 1892 



NEW YORK: 

HUNT & EATON, 

1892. 






-h 






CopyFight 

BY CRANSTON & CURTS. 

1892. 






OF 

SLIjb lirsf Bapftsf arijurrlj, 1£nu>Er, 

whose generous attendance 

on his ministry has been a constant source of 

inspiration to the author, 

this humble work 

is 

Iovingly Dedicated. 



INTRODUCTION. 



THE author of these Studies is the progress- 
ive and scholarly pastor of the First Baptist 
Church of Denver. He is the working pastor of 
a working Church, the generous friend of all the 
Churches, the firm ally of every good cause. 
The publication of this volume by the Methodist 
Book Concern is a fitting recognition of its ori- 
gin. A few months since, "as a means of in- 
creasing the intelligence of his congregation re- 
specting the various leading denominations of 
Christians, and of promoting true Christian union 
among God's people," Doctor Tupper arranged for 
a series of denominational sermons, to be given 
in his church on alternate Sunday evenings, by 
representative ministers resident in Denver. In 
this course the Disciples, Presbyterians, Luther- 
ans, Congregationalists, Protestant Episcopalians, 
Baptists, and Methodists were represented before 
large congregations. Each preacher was asked 
to speak with the utmost candor and frankness. 
The sermons had a large circulation, also, through 



6 Introduction. 

the daily press. After each of these sermons the 
pastor of the Church presented to the public, 
from his pulpit and through the press, a leading 
character belonging to the denomination just 
represented. These Seven Great Lights were 
not chosen arbitrarily; but were selected, after 
careful consultation, to represent these seven 
Churches. They are presented here in chrono- 
logical order, with Luther, founder of Protestant- 
ism, at the head, and Spurgeon, one of its finest 
products, at the close of the list. 

The unity of the Churches is here more man- 
ifest than their diversity. These Seven Great 
Rights, with many others, shine upon all the 
Churches with increasing splendor. 

These lectures are marked by the broad, cath- 
olic spirit, the felicities of style, the vigor of 
thought, and the aptness of illustration which 
characterize all their author's work. Already 
widely heard and read, they are now introduced 
and commended to their larger constituency in 
permanent form. George Eliot declared biog- 
raphy to be the disease of literature; but such 
lectures as these are mental and moral tonics. 
WIIyUAM F. McDOWEU,. 
University of Denver, March 16, 1892. 



CONTENTS 



Page 

I. MARTIN LUTHER, 9 

1483— «54<>. 

II. THOMAS CRANMER, 37 

1489—1556. 

III. JOHN KNOX, 59 

•505-1572- 

IV. JOHN WESLEY, 93 

1703-1701. 

V. JONATHAN EDWARDS, 117 

1703—1758. 

VI. ALEXANDER CAMPBELL, 141 

1786—1866. 

VII. CHARLES H. SPURGEON, . . . 161 

1834— 1892. 



7 



Seven Great Lights. 



o 



I. 

MARTIN LUTHER. 

Thou mighty man of valor." — Judges vi, 12. 
NE of the most suggestive and attractive 



pictures among all European works of 
art is Kaulbach's "Era of the Reformation." 
It hangs to-day in the noted museum at Ber- 
lin, invested with interest to every serious, 
thoughtful soul. Gazing upon it, one is im- 
pressed, as never before perhaps, with the 
many mighty heroes that trod up and down 
the continent of Europe in the sixteenth cen- 
tury of our Christian era. Science is here 
represented by Kepler and Copernicus ; royalty, 
by Queen Elizabeth; art, by Albert Diirer; 
literature, by Shakespeare; scholarship, by 
Reuchlin and Erasmus; statesmanship and 
warriorship, by Gustavus Adolphus; and re- 

9 



io Martin Luther. 

ligion, by Martin Luther. And the last named 
hero occupies the central and the most promi- 
nent position in this splendid galaxy of artists 
and astronomers, poets and philosophers, 
scholars and scientists, rulers and warriors. 
To the appreciative artist the plainly robed 
monk, with open Bible in hand and heart, is 
the master-spirit of that noted period. 

Nor is Kaulbach alone in attributing to 
Luther the first and most exalted place among 
his compeers and companions. We turn to 
the writings of Lessing, one of Germany's 
most eminent poets, and a man who, because 
an agnostic, is certainly not biased in the re- 
former's favor, and find him saying: " Luther 
is one of the greatest men the world has ever 
known. The traits in him which prove him 
to have been only a human being after all, 
are as dear to me as the most overpowering 
of his perfections." " Luther," says Ernst 
Arndt, Germany's patriotic singer, "was the 
highest developed flower of the spiritual life 
of his time, produced in word and song. He 
it was that imprinted in the German language 
the stamp of majesty." In his famous "Let- 



Martin Luther. ii 

ters in Furtherance of Humanity," that sweet- 
souled poet-philosopher, Herder, in writing of 
Luther as a patriot and a man, declares, "As 
a teacher of the German nation, as one of the 
reformers of cultured Europe, he has been 
appreciated long ages ago. With the strength 
of Hercules, he attacked the religious despot- 
ism which neutralized and undermined all 
free and healthy thought. The power of his 
language and his simple mind became united 
with the sciences he had helped to strengthen 
and revive." 

Nor is that noted Shakespearean trans- 
lator, Friedrich Von Schlegel, less enthusiastic 
in his praise, when, in his "Philosophy of 
Religion," he asserts that Luther marks 
an epoch, not only in the history of the Ger- 
man language, but also in the development of 
European science and of spiritual culture in 
general. 

Open "The Salon" of that master satirist 
and poet, Heinrich Heine, and find on its 
pages this unequivocal testimony: "Luther 
is not only the greatest, but also the most 
German, man in our history. All hail to 



12 Martin Luther. 

Luther! Eternal praise to the dear man to 
whom we owe the preservation of our noblest 
treasures, and on whose gifts we are feasting 
to this very day! Luther's 'Stronghold Sure' 
was the Marseillaise of the Reformation." 
And alongside all these noted authors stands 
the German historian, Gustav Freytag, testify- 
ing thus in his "Century of the Reformation :" 
"All confessions have reason to trace back to 
Luther all that which to-day is making their 
faith soul-inspiring and a blessing for their 
life in this world. The heretic of Wittenberg 
has been a reformer for the German Catholics 
just as well as for the Protestants." How 
each of these intelligent estimates agrees with 
that of Carlyle, who, in his London lectures 
on literature, delivered in 1838, but now pub- 
lished for the first time, describes our hero 
as "the image of a large, substantial, deep 
man, that stands upon truth, justice, fairness; 
that fears nothing; considers the right, calcu- 
lates on nothing else, and adheres to it de- 
liberately and calmly through good report 
and bad." 

Surely the life, character, times, and work 



Martin Luther. 13 

of such a man as this reformer — in achieve- 
ment above Wycliffe and Tyndale, Huss and 
Melanchthon, Knox and Calvin, yea, all his 
distinguished contemporaries or even prede- 
cessors in moral revolution, Jesus Christ him- 
self excepted, — presents a study of fascinating 
interest. To study Germany with this great 
personage eliminated, is like studying Greece 
without Leonidas and Themistocles, Rome 
without Caesar and Seneca, France without 
St. Louis, England without Alfred, Scotland 
without Bruce, Holland without William the 
Silent, Sweden without Gustavus Adolphus, 
Switzerland without Arnold Winkelried, and 
America without George Washington. 

Martin Luther was born in the year of our 
Lord 1483, and on St. Martin's day, Novem- 
ber 10th ; hence his name, Martin. His birth- 
place was Eisleben, Germany — no insignifi- 
cant fact, as D'Aubigne points out: " As Judea, 
the birthplace of our religion, lay in the 
center of the ancient world, so Germany lay 
in the midst of Christian nations. She looked 
upon the Netherlands, England, France, 
Switzerland, Italy, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, 



14 Martin Luther. 

and Denmark. It was fit that the principle 
of life should develop itself in the heart of 
Europe, that its pulses might circulate through 
all the arteries of the body the generous blood 
desired to revivify its members." 

Time forbids, nor is it necessary in this 
century of enlightenment and general intelli- 
gence, that we recount in detail Luther's his- 
tory — his birth in the cottage of a poor miner, 
as was Melanchthon's in an armorer's work- 
shop and Zwingli's in a shepherd's hut; his 
early struggles with poverty; his days of se- 
verity at school; his painful privations at 
Eisenach, where he was obliged to sing by 
day and by night to get bread to keep him 
alive; his marvelous advancement in litera- 
ture and art at the age of eighteen years; 
his discovery of a Bible one day in the Er- 
furth library, the first Bible in its entirety 
that he had ever seen; his entrance into a 
convent, to become, "not a great genius, but 
a great Bible scholar, to find the aliment of 
true and God-honoring piety;" his securing, 
in 1509, the degree of Doctor of Divinity; 
his visit, in 1510, to Rome in the interest of 



Martin Luther. 15 

the Church, and his almost miraculous con- 
version when ascending the noted "Santa 
Scala;" his almost daily discourses in explana- 
tion and elucidation of the Bible, especially 
the Epistle to the Romans; his firm, vigorous 
grasp on the central truth of this epistle, as 
God's Spirit opens to his mind the glorious 
revelation of justification without merits and 
salvation without works; and his thorough, 
heaven-conferred equipment for his grand, 
heroic part in connection with one of the 
most momentous historical movements that 
ever agitated our earth — a movement which 
marks the emancipation of the human mind 
and the rise of free institutions — a movement 
which freed the world from galling shackles, 
turned the stream of centuries into fresh and 
nobler channels, and proclaimed a new and 
glorious era to the priest-ridden Church of 
God and the suffering race of man. Not that 
Martin Luther created this movement — for 
harbingers of the Reformation had already 
appeared in such colossal personages as 
Savonarola in Italy, Erasmus in Holland, 
Wycliffe in England, and Huss and Jerome 



1 6 Martin Luther. 

in Bohemia — but that this consecrated Ger- 
man monk gave the Reformation a personal, 
heroic, constantly accelerating impetus, whose 
influence is felt to-day in every land whose 
heritage is an open Bible and religious 
liberty. 

And what times those were, that attracted 
Luther's attention and called out his conse- 
crated energies as a mighty son of thunder ! 
You students of history know something of 
that period. The history of so-called religion 
contains mo more disgraceful page. Elo- 
quently and sadly does Lord, in his "Beacon 
Lights," describe the condition of things, 
when picturesquely he exclaims: "How fla- 
grant those evils! — who can deny them? — the 
papal despotism, and the frauds on which it 
was based; monastic corruptions; penance 
and indulgences for sin, and the sale of them, 
more harmful still; the secular character of 
the clergy; the pomp, wealth, and arrogance 
of bishops; auricular confession; celibacy of 
the clergy, their idle and dissolute life, their 
ignorance and superstition; the worship of 
the images of saints, and the masses for the 



Martin Luther, 17 

dead ; the gorgeous ritualism of the mass ; 
the substitution of legends for the Scriptures, 
which were not translated nor read by the 
people ; pilgrimages, processions, idle pomp, 
and the multiplication of holy days; above 
all, the grinding spiritual despotism exercised 
by priests, with their inquisitions and excom- 
munications, all centering in the terrible 
usurpation of the pope, keeping the human 
mind in bondage and suppressing all intel- 
lectual independence, — these evils prevailed 
everywhere." 

Had there been nothing at this period but 
the infamous system of " indulgences," that 
were black and dire enough. Its occasion 
and history are generally familiar. Pope 
Leo X is bankrupt; his profligacy has brought 
him to want. St. Peter's Church — "the 
crowning glory of papal magnificence " — must 
be finished. To aid in this, Leo brings to 
the front once again a base custom, which 
men had dreamed was buried, never to see a 
resurrection, beneath the debris of a by-gone 
age of darkness — the custom of selling in- 
dulgences for sin. In every direction agents 



1 8 Martin Luther. 

are sent out to promote the vile scheme. 
Chief among these is a Dominican monk, 
known to history as Tetsel. In his vulgarity 
and insincerity he appears in Saxony, with 
these shameful and shameless claims, born 
out of the degradation of that degenerate 
day: 

" Draw near, and I will give you letters, duly 
sealed, by which even the sins you shall here- 
after desire to commit shall be forgiven you. 
I would not exchange my privileges for those 
of St. Peter in heaven, for I have saved more 
souls by my indulgences than he by his ser- 
mons. There is no sin so great that the in- 
dulgence can not remit ; and even if any 
should — which is impossible — ravish the holy 
mother of God, let him only pay largely, and 
it shall be forgiven him. The very moment 
the money goes into the pope's box, that mo- 
ment even the condemned soul of the sinner 
flies to heaven." 

This quotation, reported in Millot's History, 
is corroborated by Von Ranke's statement that 
" the most nefarious [sin of the day] was the 
sale of indulgences for the commission of sin. 



Martin Luther. 19 

Italian religion bad become tbe art of plunder- 
ing the people." 

Universally and pathetically tbe appeal is 
beard for some band, human or divine — nay, 
for two hands, the human and the divine, 
closely joined in glad, successful co-operation — 
to be raised for the rescue of a Church cov- 
ered all over with ritual and tainted all 
through with tradition. It is time that "that 
great organization which had painted sinless 
Madonnas, and had shown tbe immaculate 
face of mother and Son to the barbarians from 
the North, and carried these pure ideals upon 
a march of thirteen hundred years, should 
begin to demand that the morality seen on 
canvas begin to appear in human life." The 
world, national and Christian, must relapse 
into barbarism, unless something be done to 
enlighten mind, purify heart, and trans- 
form life. 

And the help soon comes. God is ever 
true to his word, and it is his word that de- 
clares, respecting the Church, that "the gates 
of Hades shall not prevail against it" — His 
own body, born in heaven, its divine impri- 



2o Martin Luther. 

matur stamped with Gethsemane's groans and 
sealed with Calvary's blood. On the arena 
appears Luther. As gentle as a lamb in as- 
sisting right, he is bold as a lion in resisting 
wrong. He is just the man for reformatory 
work — the John the Baptist of the sixteenth 
century. "Sprung from the people; poor, 
popular, fervent; educated amid privations; 
religious by nature, yet with exuberant ani- 
mal spirits; dogmatic, boisterous, intrepid, 
practical, untiring, generous, learned; eman- 
cipated from the terrors of the Middle Ages; 
scorning the Middle Ages, progressive in his 
spirit, lofty in his character, earnest in his 
piety; believing in the future and in God; 
bold, audacious, with deep convictions and 
rapid intellectual processes ; prompt, decided, 
brave, — he loved the storms of battles, he im- 
personated revolutionary ideas." As Athana- 
sius was raised up by God in the early centu- 
ries to defend contra mundiim the divine dig- 
nity of the Son of God, so was Luther at this 
period, to declare with a stentorian voice, a 
leonine heart, and a Pauline spirit, the great 
truths of liberty of conscience, private judg- 



Martin Luther. 21 

ment, an open Bible, and salvation alone 
through Jesus Christ — man's divine Sovereign 
and Savior. 

With careful thought this man of God pre- 
pares his theses — ninety-five strong, unan- 
swerable propositions — against the crime of 
indulgences, and with brave heart and firm 
hand, on October 31, 1517, he nails them to 
the Schlosskirche at Wittenberg. In conse- 
quence of the act an intense excitement is 
produced in all directions and on the part of 
all classes — now among abbots and bishops; 
now among university students and the great 
masses of the people. All Rome, especially, 
is stirred from center to circumference. The 
pope summons IyUther to the Eternal City ; 
but, befriended by Saxony's king, he refuses 
to obey the call. A learned father of the 
Church is commissioned to visit him, with the 
view of changing his opinions or of conquer- 
ing his will ; but the interview accomplishes 
naught, save to strengthen the reformer's con- 
victions. The distinguished controversialist, 
Dr. Kck, challenges him to a public debate; 
but fails to gain a victory over the man that 



22 Martin Luther, 

places triumphantly over against all ecclesi- 
astical traditions and Council decrees the in- 
fallible Word of the Eternal God. The pope 
excommunicates him; but he fearlessly con- 
signs to flames the worthless "Bull," ex- 
claiming, as he flings it into the fire: "As 
thou [the pope] hast troubled the Holy One of 
the Lord, may the eternal fire trouble and 
consume thee!" He is ordered to the Diet 
of Worms ; but all efforts to make him recant 
have no effect upon the strong-hearted, God- 
guided Teuton, as he appears before the 
splendid array of potentates, national and ec- 
clesiastical, with the immortal declaration: 
"On God's Word I take my stand; I can not 
do otherwise. God help me ! Amen." What 
a magnificent actualization of the poet's splen- 
did picture ! — 

"As some tall cliff that lifts its awful form, 
Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm, 
Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread, 
Eternal sunshine settles on its head." 

The battle of the Reformation is .now 
begun. IyUther has arrayed the two forces 
over against each other: On the one side, tra- 



Martin Luther. 23 

dition, the pope, papal Councils; on the other, 
the Bible, conscience, private judgment. Es- 
pecially now is the Bible to have free course 
and to be glorified. Heretofore it has been 
bound to chains, or concealed on shelves in 
dark libraries; now it is to go forth, conquer- 
ing and to conquer, imparting liberty to the 
individual conscience, character to law, sta- 
bility to national life, and thus opening up 
vast and varied fields for mental, social, and 
moral development. 

Hear Luther strike the key-note to his 
grandest mission in these words: "What! 
Keep the Light of Life from the people ; take 
away their Guide to heaven; keep them in 
ignorance of what is most precious and most 
exalted ; deprive them of the blessed consola- 
tions that sustain the soul in trial and in death ; 
deny the most palpable truths, because digni- 
taries put on them a construction to bolster 
up their power! What an abomination! 
What treachery to heaven! What perils to 
the souls of men!" 

And Luther has another mission, imposed 
of God, in the great work before him. He is 



24 Martin Luther. 

both to revolutionize and to advance the sci- 
ence of education among his people. " There 
is scarcely a disposition that marks the love of 
abstract truth," says Lecky, in his "History 
of Rationalism in Europe," a and scarcely a 
rule which reason teaches as essential for its 
attainment, that theologians did not for cen- 
turies stigmatize as offensive to the Almighty. 
By destroying every book that could generate 
discussion; by diffusing through every field of 
knowledge a spirit of boundless credulity ; 
and, above all, by persecuting with atrocious 
cruelty those who differed from their opin- 
ions, — they succeeded for a long period in al- 
most arresting the action of the European 
mind, and in persuading men that a critical, 
impartial, and inquiring spirit was the worst 
form of vice." 

Heretofore, Latin has been the language 
of science and religion. With Latin the peo- 
ple are unfamiliar, and so the great body of 
them are in ignorance, cut off from the priv- 
ileges and advantages of mental development 
and acquisition. The reformer of Eisleben 
preaches in German and writes in German. 



Martin Luther. 25 

The effect is immediate and glorious. Knowl- 
edge is popularized, and the craving for it 
becomes eager and general. Schools spring up 
and flourish. Books are published, circulated, 
read with avidity. The printing-press carries 
far and wide the results of research in art and 
philosophy, science and religion. " The lonely 
miner's son, with the heart of a lion, has 
struck the blow that has broken the shackles 
of superstition and priestcraft. Men can now 
study, think, act, without reference to the 
dogmas of a corrupt Church. A paralyzed 
literary and Christian world is infused with 
fresh blood and new forces, and all the new 
energies of its being start up and diffuse them- 
selves into grander channels of development 
and progress." A new era has come upon 
the world ; not created, as some have thought, 
by the march of the Crusaders, or by the in- 
vention of the compass, or by printing, or by 
gunpowder, but by the Spirit of the Living 
God through the spirit of an earnest man. 

And in the face of what determined foes, 
against what formidable odds, was this grand 
work, to which IyUther gave so noble an im- 



26 Martin Luther. 

pulse, to grow and strengthen! A rich, volup- 
tuous hierarchy; the mighty power of the 
German Empire, reposing then in the Austrian 
House of Hapsburg ; the strong hosts of Spain ; 
the hot flames of the stake ; the heartless rack 
of the Inquisition ; the red carnage of the Thirty 
Years' War, with its terrific destruction of life 
and devastation of property, — all these things 
arrayed, in gigantic opposition, to this work 
of God! And yet, because God's work, how 
it developed and conquered, slowly, surely, 
gloriously, until its principles of light and 
life, of freedom and progress, are found tri- 
umphant to-day in Germany and Scandinavia, 
Holland and Switzerland, England and Scot- 
land, and our own fair Republic this side of 
the Atlantic! 

And what blessings it has scattered all 
along its pathway of glory! "We can fairly 
say," writes perhaps the most noted Jewish 
rabbi in America, "that a comparison of the 
intellectual condition of countries where Ca- 
tholicism holds sway undisputed, with that of 
the territories reclaimed by Protestantism, 
shows that, without Luther's Reformation, our 



Martin Luther. 27 

modern science conld not have spread her 
pinions. Kven the Catholic Church has felt 
this man's influence. The gross abuses of 
which Luther complained; the venality of 
the higher dignitaries; the shameless immo- 
rality of the mitered shepherds, — are blemishes 
which to-day can not be pointed out in Cath- 
olics, which would not have been the case if 
the Reformation had not been successful." 
Weighty words these, from one who, neither 
a Protestant nor a Catholic, surveys this whole 
matter with the eye of a critic and of a histo- 
rian. The Reformation was far from a per- 
fect achievement; but more than any other 
event in human history, save the establish- 
ment of that Christianity of which it was a 
beautiful product, it has been instrumental in 
giving to our world and age priceless personal 
liberty, exalted educational privileges, uni- 
versal political equality, and joyous, absolute, 
unrestricted religious freedom. 

When, on that sad day in February, 1546, 
Martin Luther died, earth lost one of its 
noblest champions of the right of private 
judgment and the glory of liberty of con- 



28 Martin Luther. 

science — each man's privilege to think and 
act as he himself may decide, in the fear of 
God and without the fear of man. To the 
victory of this principle the world owes its 
truest progress. As Isaac Taylor well puts 
it, "The absolutely unrestricted development 
and the strict conservatism of religious differ- 
ences is a principal, and indeed an indis- 
pensable condition, of social advancement, 
and of the progress of a people toward a state 
of equipoise without stagnation. Religious 
differences well defined, firmly maintained, 
and fully developed, and in such a condition 
that they are not merely elements, but are 
energies within the social mass, when duly 
attempered, stand, if not foremost, quite prom- 
inent, among the forces that are carrying us 
forward toward a higher civilization." 

We have time but for a remaining ques- 
tion: What was it in Luther — the man, the 
hero, the theologian — which, in connection 
with a Higher Power, produced such a work 
as that which all unprejudiced minds to-day 
admire and praise; a work which has been 
celebrated so widely and so enthusiastically; 



Martin Luther, 29 

a work which to-day, after a lapse of more 
than four hundred years, is fondly remem- 
bered by two hundred millions of the human 
race? 

One of the chief elements of greatness in 
our hero was his deep sincerity and earnest- 
ness of purpose. Other men excelled him in 
other qualities — Erasmus in classic culture, 
Zwingli in intellectual acumen, Calvin in or- 
ganizing capacity, Melanchthon in spiritual 
life; but above each of these men of God 
stood out and up "the little monk," as George 
of Freudsburg used to call him, in strong 
conviction and unwavering determination. 
Mark the emphasis with which he speaks 
when taking the oath of Doctor Divinitatis : 
"I swear to defend evangelical truth with all 
my might!" — and the man meant it. He 
hated cant, hypocrisy, dissimulation, as the 
very offspring of the devil himself. " If I de- 
spised the pope," he once said, "as those men 
despise him who praise him with their lips, I 
should tremble lest the earth should instantly 
open and swallow me alive, like Korah and his 
company." He hurled, with such tremendous 



30 Martin Luther. 

power, thunderbolts at Leo X and Henry VIII, 
because he scorned their insincerity and per- 
fidy. He burned the papal bull, because 
aroused to a conviction of no man's right 
over another's conscience. He stood unmoved 
at the Diet of Worms, because his faith rested 
on a Petrine foundation that could not be 
moved. It has well been said that this one 
element of sincerity and purpose makes the 
great hot heart of Luther the livest thing in 
Europe to-day. 

Another noble characteristic of the Ger- 
man reformer — indeed, the basal stone of all 
his grandest success — was his supreme, sub- 
lime, surpassing faith in Almighty God. To 
him Jehovah was always near, real, tangible 
by his hand of aspiration, visible by his eye 
of faith. He seemed to pierce the veil that 
separates the unseen from the seen. He 
lived beyond the sense-realm. The super- 
natural with him was tremendously a fact. 
God was the inspiration of his strength, his 
courage, his every achievement. " Whatever 
I do," exclaims he, on one occasion, "will 
not be done by the prudence of man, but by 



Martin Luther. 31 

the counsel of God. If the work be of God, 
who can stop it? if of man, who can for- 
ward it?" 

And as the Baptist recognized himself de- 
creasing before the increasing greatness of 
the Christ, so Luther felt his nothingness in 
the presence of the Infinite and the Eternal. 
You recall how, when, on his way from Wit- 
tenberg to meet Cajetan in discussion at 
Augsburg, the multitude made the air ring 
with the cry of adulation, " Martin Luther 
forever!" he turned, and, looking upon them, 
quietly exclaimed, u God forever, and his 
Word!" and when they respond, "Courage, 
master, and God will help you!" he, the right 
chord having been struck in his consecrated 
soul, replied, "Amen, and amen!" To God, 
his Protector and Guide, would he have the 
glory and honor universally ascribed. He 
used to sing with rapture : 

"A mighty fortress is our God, 
A bulwark never failing." 
A third grand and admirable trait of Luther 
was his magnificent natural courage. One 
picture of this may suffice. It is when this 



32 Martin Luther. 

mighty iconoclast is summoned to appear at 
the Diet of Worms — this time, not by papal, 
but by kingly power. Bring the scene before 
you. It has its counterpart in Elijah before 
Baal's prophets on the slopes of Carinel. 
Charles V, the emperor, is there; and there 
also bishops, dignitaries, generals, legates. 
Over against them, the little monk; but he, 
with God, in the majority. What is his 
speech? Terse, pointed, epigrammatic: u Un- 
less you confute me by arguments drawn from 
Scripture, I can not and will not recant any- 
thing. Here I stand; I can not otherwise. 
God help me ! Amen." What a scene ! 
What a man! It is John before Herod, Knox 
before Mary, Chrysostom before Budoxia. He 
fears no ecclesiastical authority, no kingly 
power, no papal bull, no infuriated mob. 
Like his noble predecessor in theology, he 
can face the whole world, and, with unshaken 
courage, exclaim: "None of these things 
move me." Well was it for Luther that 
he had in him such stuff as made him al- 
ways and everywhere a mighty man of valor. 
His whole life, after his conversion, was a 



Martin Luther. 33 

battle — a heroic struggle. And inevitably was 
this so. 

"He who ascends the mountain-tops shall find 

The loftiest peak most wrapped in clouds and storms; 

Though high above the sun of glory shines, 

And far beneath the earth and ocean spread, 
Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow 

Contending tempests on his naked head." 

Finally, Martin L,uther was a man of clear, 
unhesitating acceptance, as far as he had 
light, of the Holy Scriptures as the God-given 
guide of Christian faith and practice. The 
Bible he meant to make his code and creed — 
not human tradition nor Council decrees nor 
papal authority, but the infallible Word of 
the infallible God. The memorable words of 
Chillingworth he would make the rallying 
cry of the Reformation: "The Bible! the 
Bible! the Bible is the book of Protestants !" 
With firm, abiding faith in its all-sufficiency, 
when faithfully received and interpreted, he 
could calmly say to the knight who offered 
him arms to protect him: "By the Word the 
world was conquered ; by the Word the Church 
has been saved ; and by the Word both world 

3 



34 Martin Luther. 

and Church may gain their highest triumphs." 
And when struggling along for twelve studi- 
ous years in preparing for his nation that re- 
markable translation of the Bible, in which 
now for three hundred years the Germans 
have read God's Word, how earnestly, en- 
thusiastically, he reiterates such sentiments as 
these: " The Scriptures are the legacy of the 
early Church to universal humanity; the equal 
and treasured inheritance to all nations and 
tribes and kindreds upon the face of earth! 
It was intended that they should be diffused, 
and that every one should read and interpret 
them for himself; for each has a soul to save, 
and he does not trust such a precious thing 
as a soul to the keeping of priests. No, I 
say, let the Scriptures be put into the hand 
of every one; let every one interpret it for 
himself, according to the light he has; let 
spiritual liberty be revived as in apostolic 
days. Then only will the people be emanci- 
pated from the Middle Ages, arise in their 
power and majesty, obey the voice of enlight- 
ened conscience, be true to their convictions, 
practice the virtues which Christianity com- 



Martin Luther. 35 

mands, obey God rather than man, defy all 
persecutors and martyrdom, — possessed of a 
serene, abiding faith in the glorious gospel!" 

What a ring of truth and power in such 
words as these! How Luther exalted that 
only Book, which, with God as its author and 
salvation as its object, has come down the 
ages, relieving human conscience, illuminat- 
ing human intellects, irradiating human 
spirits, and transforming human lives! With 
this Book he went; through it he saw; by it 
he conquered, — striking cruel shackles from 
mind and spirit, dispelling dark clouds that 
covered the firmament of the Church, and 
crowning his day and ours with beauties and 
possibilities vouchsafed to no other age of the 
world's checkered lifel 

W r e leave our interesting subject, recall- 
ing, as we retire, the poet's lines, of which 
the noted German reformer is so striking an 

illustration : 

"Great offices will have 
Great talents ; and God gives to every man 
The virtue, temper, understanding, taste, 
That lift him into life ; and lets him fall 
Just in the niche he was ordained to fill." 



II. 

THOMAS CRANMER. 

"The man that made not God his strength." 

— Psalm wi, 7. 



M 



ARTIN LUTHER in Germany, John 
Calvin in Switzerland and France, John 
Knox in Scotland, Hugh Latimer and Thomas 
Cranmer in England, — these are the five great 
sovereign spirits in the mighty movement of 
the Protestant Reformation three hundred 
years ago. Not that Cranmer was so grand 
a character as either one of his heroic com- 
panions; for he lacked, in even a sad degree, 
the magnetic influence of the German re- 
former, the intellectual grasp of the Swiss 
scholar, the magnificent courage of the Scotch 
hero, and the conscientious convictions and 
noble soul of his brother English martyr; but 
that he was one of the most prominent fig- 
ures in the Reformation, and has won a name 
and fame wherever the English Bible is loved 
and the English Prayer-book read. 

37 



38 Thomas Cranmer. 

In order to have an intelligent apprecia- 
tion of the character and career of this first 
Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, it is 
necessary to study him as he appears before 
us in a threefold relationship: First, as a 
scholar; second, as connected with Henry VIII ; 
and third, as the subject of the fierce indig- 
nation and fiery retribution of "Bloody Mary." 

This line of study we adopt at present, 
passing over, with simple mention, such well- 
known facts as his birth in Aslacton, Eng- 
land, July 2, 1489; his descent from an ancient 
Norman family of no little respectability and 
distinction; his entrance into Jesus College, 
Cambridge, at the age of fourteen years; his 
successful prosecution there of Hebrew, Greek, 
and theology; his election, when only twenty- 
one years old, to a fellowship in his Alma 
Mater; his loss of this fellowship through 
matrimony, and the regaining of it through 
the death of his wife; his lectureship in Mag- 
dalen College ; and his securing, at the age of 
thirty-four years, the honored degree of Doctor 
of Divinity. 

It is as a thinker, student, scholar, that our 



Thomas Cranmer. 39 

subject presents himself in the most attractive 
elements of his character Few, if any, men 
of his period exhibited more thoroughly the 
scholarly instinct and aspiration than this 
Canterbury archbishop. To this essential, 
prominent element of his being he was in- 
debted for the attainment of the position he 
so richly deserved and so nobly held as the 
leading minister and statesman of the English 
Reformation. His was a day demanding 
scholarly thought and progress. As another 
sums it up, "The world's new life was coming 
on apace — Christopher Columbus, Giovanni 
Cabot, and Amerigo Vespucci revealing to 
Europe a vast continent in the Western 
main; Copernicus telling the mysteries of the 
starry sky; Ariosto singing his Southern 
songs; and Raphael, Titian, Da Vinci, and 
Correggio displaying their transcendent genius 
in the domain of art." The kingdom of God 
must have defenders of strong intellectual 
gifts. And such a one was Cranmer. 

As a child he was a tireless reader; as a 
youth, an earnest thinker; as a man, an en- 
thusiastic student and writer. Among the 



40 Thomas Cranmer. 

leading scholars of Cambridge, chosen for their 
knowledge by Cardinal Wolsey as teachers in 
the newly-established Oxford College, we find 
Cranmer's name conspicuous. His philo- 
sophical turn of mind led him to dive deep 
down into the subtleties of the Middle-Age 
schoolmen; his linguistic attainments gave 
him a relish for the Greek studies projected 
by Erasmus; and his religious disposition 
made attractive to him the Word of God, as 
Luther struck from that Word shackles that 
had bound it for ages, and gave it free course 
in emancipated minds and aspiring souls. 

It is in connection with the Bible that 
Cranmer will be longest and most fondly re- 
membered. What the converted Eisleben 
monk did for the Germans in the translation 
of the Book, the Canterbury archbishop, in 
part, did for the English ; and it was through 
his influence, along with that of Latimer, that 
the noble order of 1538 was procured, whereby 
every meeting-house for religious purposes 
throughout the length and breadth of Eng- 
land should contain at least one copy of the 
Oracles of God. How much that meant, in 



Thomas Cranmer. 41 

that dark day of religious ignorance and Bible 
neglect, we find it hard to realize in our day 
of exalted spiritual privileges and possibil- 
ities. The newly translated work was awaited 
with the deepest anxiety, received with joy 
unspeakable and full of glory, and read with 
unwonted earnestness and avidity. A writer, 
in sympathy with the movement, tells us that 
it was "wonderful to see with what joy this 
Book of God was received, not only among 
the learned sort and those that were noted as 
lovers of the Reformation, but generally all 
England over, among all the vulgar and com- 
mon people; and with what greediness God's 
Word was read, and what resort to places 
where the reading of it was. Every one that 
could, bought the Book, or busily read it, or 
got others to read it for him, if he could not 
read it himself; and divers more elderly peo- 
ple learned to read on purpose. And even 
little boys flocked, among the rest, to hear 
portions of the Holy Scriptures read." It 
was a day of congratulation, of enthusiastic, 
unbridled delight. L,ong had the papacy con- 
cealed from popufar view the everlasting 



42 Thomas Cranmer. 

truth, and now it breaks forth as a new rev- 
elation from the Eternal Court, for rich and 
poor, exalted and humble. Thus, in the En- 
glish Reformation, "Cranmer was the moving 
spirit. His was the hand that guided the 
Church through those days of trouble; his 
was the mind that devised the course and 
controlled the actions of the more hasty and 
the less judicious of his party." It was 
chiefly his brain and heart that wrought out 
in beauty and glory a Bible translation for 
the masses of the people. 

And in another happy direction did Cran- 
mer devote his scholarly energies. To him, 
more than to any other man of history, is the 
Church of God indebted for the pure, attract- 
ive language of the English Prayer-book, 
read to-day by twenty-five millions of the 
Church; and for the clear, though not full, 
statement of the Forty-one Articles — now re- 
duced to Thirty-nine — in themselves "a theo- 
logical cresd, evangelical, but not Calvinistic, 
affirming the great ideas of Augustine and 
Luther as to grace, justification by faith, and 
original sin, and repudiating purgatory, par- 



Thomas Cranmer. 43 

dons, the worship and invocation of saints 
and images; a larger creed than the Nicene 
or Athanasian, and comprehensive." As we 
see this man of God intensely at work at the 
Lambeth Palace on Bible translation and 
creed formation, our minds revert to the saintly 
Jerome, in his humble Oriental cell, devoting 
months of prayer and patient study to his 
immortal Vulgate. A noble monument to 
Cranmer may be found to-day erected in stone 
in old Giles Street, Oxford ; but a nobler 
monument of his consecrated gifts he himself 
has reared in his "Book of Common Prayer," 
his rich "Homilies," and his world-renowned 
"Articles," each one of which bears the beau- 
tiful impress of his cultured spirit. Studying 
our subject -here, as elsewhere, we appreciate 
the judgment respecting him expressed by 
Lord, in his noted "Beacon Lights," when he 
describes him as a moderate, calm, scholarly 
man, not a great genius nor a great preacher, 
no fearless and impetuous Luther, no severely 
logical Calvin, no uncomplaining and aggres- 
sive reformer like Knox ; but if less eloquent, 
less fearless, less logical, less able than these, 



44 Thomas Cranmer. 

probably broader, more comprehensive in his 
views, adapting his reforms to the circum- 
stances of his age and country and to the genius 
of the English mind. The world has need of 
such men as scholarly Cranmer — learned, 
knowledge-full, great brained, able to stand 
before a proud, palpitating world, and, with 
marked and effective force, declare that, with 
all its advancement in art and science and 
philosophy and literature, humanity has not 
as yet outgrown the unapproachable thought, 
the infinite revelations of the Master of 
the Ages. 

The second notable period in Cranmer's 
career was in connection with Henry VIII — 
more notable than the first period, even as 
our subject was more prominent as a states- 
man, we might even say politician, than as a 
minister of the gospel or a theological writer. 
And the sympathetic student of history can 
not but feel deep regret that this reformer, in 
many respects so generous in impulse, so 
noble in nature, should have been brought 
into anything like close contact with so base 
and infamous a monarch as the then ruling 



Thomas Cranmer. 45 

sovereign of England — u the most capricious 
and cruel of tyrants ; cruel and unscrupulous 
when crossed ; a man who rarely retained a 
friendship or remembered a service; who 
never forgave an injury or forgot an affront; 
a glutton and a sensualist;" a man who, had 
he but possessed a sincere heart, a high pur- 
pose, and a pure life, might, through his many 
social gifts, royal privileges, and extensive re- 
ligious knowledge, have held an exalted place 
in English history, and have exerted a most 
enviable influence for good upon all succeed- 
ing generations, but who, because of so much 
weakness and infamy, passed from the stage 
of human action, "unwept, unhonored, and 
unsung." 

The relations of Cranmer with Henry VIII 
began in 1529. At this time the base, licen- 
tious king was seeking to divorce Queen 
Katherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand 
and Isabella, of Spain — who, at the age of 
sixteen years, had been married to Henry's 
eldest brother, Arthur, he dying six months 
after the marriage— that he. might have some 
ground on which to substitute in her place 



46 Thomas Cranmer, 

Anne Boleyn. Along with other distinguished 
men of the realm, Cranmer gave it as his opin- 
ion that the whole question in connection with 
the royal divorce might be settled as satisfac- 
torily and finally by the representatives of the 
Church in the English universities as by the 
prominent representative of the Church in 
Rome, the pope. Both Cranmer and Henry 
knew what this meant — the sundering of the 
king's tie with Katherine, and the forming of 
a union with Anne. For this, Henry had 
worked with the pope and with Wolsey, but 
ineffectually. Delighted at Cranmer's decis- 
ions, the king, vile soul that he was, sent for 
the archbishop, gave him a place in the house 
of Anne Boleyn's father, Lord Willshire, and 
besought of him, for the favors received, to pro- 
duce for the English public and the king's 
satisfaction an unanswerable argument why 
Katherine should be cast aside and Anne made 
queen in her place. The weak minister list- 
ened to the solicitations, and published his 
view, declaring that the Bible condemned 
marriage with a brother's widow — such a mar- 
riage was Henry's with Katherine, the relict 



Thomas Cranmer. 47 

of Prince Arthur — therefore, in God's sight 
and by Scriptural law, she was no lawful wife 
of Henry, though, to quote another, she had 
shared a wedded life of more than a score of 
years, been a true and faithful wife, borne his 
children, been known and loved all through 
England as a true queen, and her marriage 
sanctioned from the first by the authority of 
the pope. 

The divorce secured, Katherine was turned 
away, and King Henry and Anne Boleyn 
joined in marriage, May 28, 1533. The oc- 
casion was a magnificent one, so far as pa- 
geantry and outward show were concerned. In 
Westminster, on Whitsunday, the coronation 
took place ; two archbishops, five bishops, and 
a dozen abbots were present ; Te Dewn sung, 
mass celebrated, and a grand banquet served 
in honor of the occasion. And it was Thomas 
Cranmer himself that placed the crown on the 
head of the queen of the adulterer! Were 
ever Church and State linked in a baser 
union? 

And bear in mind that Cranmer was 
at this time a member of the Church of 



48 Thomas Cranmer. 

England. In 1530, after a visit to Clement 
VII to secure papal sanction of Henry's 
divorce, he had entered Germany, been 
converted to evangelical truth as held and 
propagated by the adherents of L,uther, allied 
himself in marriage to a daughter of one of 
the most prominent Lutheran leaders, and, 
returning to England, had become the first 
Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury. It was 
as archbishop that Cranmer declared Henry's 
and Katherine's marriage as illegitimate, and, 
on June 1, 1533, personally witnessed Anne's 
coronation, presenting her, as the lawful wife 
of Henry VIII, the crown and scepter. No 
wonder that such a man was ready, when 
this marriage of Henry and Anne proved un- 
satisfactory to the king, to pronounce it null 
and void, as he had basely declared it valid a 
short time previously ; later to sanction Anne's 
arrest and death ; the day after the beheading 
of this queen, to commend Henry's marriage 
to Jane Seymour; after Jane's death, to ap- 
prove the king's marriage by proxy to Anne 
of Cleves, and, in turn, her divorce; the very 
next year to sanction the marriage of Henry 






Thomas Cranmer. 49 

and Katherine Howard, and also this queen's 
death in less than two years after the mar- 
riage; and the very next year Henry's union 
with Katherine Parr. 

How, do you ask, shall we defend Cranmer 
in these acts? We answer, Make no defense 
at all for him. True, he placed the divorce on 
the ground of the Bible law, and in so doing, 
unintentionally perhaps, projected that great 
doctrine that lies at the very basis of the 
Reformation — God's Word the final arbiter in 
matters of human conduct; but still we can 
not but feel that, in all that Cranmer did in 
this connection, timidity or desire to curry 
royal favor was the preponderating element. 
To us it seems that with this weak man it 
was not so much what God said in his Word 
as what Henry might say in his kingdom. 
We have here striking illustrations of Cran- 
mer's constitutional cowardice. How dif- 
ferent from Knox before Mary, or L,uther be- 
fore Charles V! He was more an unsteady 
meteor than a fixed star; more a reed shaken 
by every passing wind than a firm, deeply 
rooted oak, defying, in its strength, storms 

4 



50 Thomas Cranmer. 

and tempests. In constitution, both mental 
and moral, Cranmer was more a timid, 
scholarly Erasmus than a heroic, courageous 
Luther; and it was due to his inexcusably 
weak, vacillating conduct that, after Henry's 
excommunication by the pope and Anne's ar- 
rest for adultery, our subject was compelled 
later to suffer the mortification of retracting 
his former declaration concerning the mar- 
riage, and pronouncing it unsanctioned by 
God and by the Church. Will the man ever 
get free from the meshes into which his incon- 
sistency has thrown him? Anne put to death, 
Henry married the day after to Jane Seymour, 
who, soon afterwards dying, left the king free 
to marry Anne of Cleves, which alliance Cran- 
mer commends at the time, but in less than 
a year afterwards pronounces null and void. 
From one degree of inconsistency, and even 
sin, to another, the fickle man goes, his in- 
consistency and sin gathering force and vol- 
ume year by year, — now a participant in 
the murder of Lord Seymour; now a perse- 
cutor of Catholic prelates; now a particeps 
criminis in the burning of at least two heretics 



Thomas Cranmer. 51 

for the denial of the doctrine of transubstan- 
tiation. The whole study here is painful in 
the extreme, and justifies the remark made 
by a noted scholar, that the trouble with 
Cranmer all through life was, that he was 
too fearful about what might come to him. 
The fact is — there is nothing gained by 
concealing or extenuating it — Thomas Cran- 
mer was essentially a coward, possessed of u a 
weak yielding to others instead of being true 
to the convictions of conscience. " Not that 
the archbishop had no good points — for many 
excellencies in him appear in his tearful in- 
tercession for Cromwell, his earnest pleadings 
for unfortunate Anne Boleyn, and his noble 
martyr-death — but that he was overborne by 
a weak will and cowardly constitution, which 
make us blush for him in almost every period 
of his life. This vacillating servant of God 
needed some consecrated Norman McLeod to 
stand before him in his hours of trial and 
cowardice, and strengthen him with the song: 

"Courage, brother! do not stumble, 
Though thy path be dark as night; 
There 's a star to guide the humble — ■ 
Trust in God, and do the right! 



52 Thomas Cranmer. 

Perish policy and cunning; 

Perish all that fears the light; 
Whether losing, whether winning, 

Trust in God, and do the right! 

Some will hate thee, some will love thee, 
Some will flatter, some will slight; 

Cease from man, and look above thee — 
Trust in God, and do the right! 

Simple rule and safest guiding, 
Inward peace and inward light; 

Star upon thy path abiding — 
Trust in God, and do the right!" 

We come finally to Cranmer's last days. 
These are intimately and sadly connected 
with " Bloody Mary." To Henry, when dying, 
the archbishop had made solemn promise that 
the crown should never, with his consent, pass 
from his line; later, to Edward, dying, the 
archbishop made promise in direct violation 
of the vow he had taken before Henry, and 
then favored Lady Jane Grey as queen. The 
day after Edward's burial, Cranmer was sent 
to Lambeth, where, because of his expression 
respecting the mass, he was committed to the 
Tower as guilty of treason and sedition. Re- 
leased afterwards, through Parliament influ- 



Thomas Cranmer. 53 

ence, he was sent to Oxford to be tried for 
heresy, along with Ridley and Latimer. He 
was sentenced to death. Again his timidity, 
his cowardice, got the better of him. He 
trembled at the very thought of the physical 
pain incident upon burning at the stake. He 
begged for life; he recanted his former faith 
once, twice, repeatedly ; but to no avail. 
Bloody Mary was on the throne at this time, 
a devoted Roman Catholic, despising in the 
very depth of her soul all Protestant alliances. 
She had put to death Lady Jane Grey. She 
had made Cardinal Pole Canterbury's arch- 
bishop. She had given heartless sanction to 
the death at the stake of even the children of 
heretics. No fewer than two hundred and 
fifty persons had been burned alive by her in 
less than three years. Think of the noble 
martyrs in the year 1555 alone, — Hooper, 
Rogers, Saunders, Taylor, Farrer, Bradford, 
Latimer, and Ridley! The woman seemed 
determined to drench all England with mar- 
tyr-blood, repeating the crimes of Philip of 
Spain upon the defenseless Netherlands. 

Now, this queen hated Cranmer with abso- 



54 Thomas Cranmer. 

lute hatred. Nothing finer, just here, has 
been written than by the gifted author of that 
work, to which reference will be often made by 
us in these studies, "Heretics of Yesterday :" 
" There were some questions that were rankling 
in her breast that she proceeded to answer. 
Who had labored with tongue and pen, with 
hand and foot, through England and the Con- 
tinent, to accomplish the dethronement of her 
mother? Cranmer. Who had officially pro- 
nounced that mother a twenty-years' mistress, 
and herself illegitimate — a princess without a 
name ? Cranmer. Who had joined her father's 
hand in marriage to an upstart of inferior 
rank, while her royal mother was still living in 
loyal and loving seclusion? Cranmer. Who 
had helped her father to break her mother's 
heart? Cranmer. And who, through all these 
years, had aided and abetted him in perpetuat- 
ing the wrong ? Cranmer. Who had officially 
banished from England the authority and the 
rites of the Church she loved? Cranmer. Who, 
to crown the long list of wrongs, had permitted 
her personal rights to be ignored, and had lent 
himself to the attempt to put another upon 






Thomas Cranmer. 55 

her throne, and her hereditary crown upon 
the head of another? Cranmer. There was 
no man in the realm to whom she owed such 
a measure of indignation and wrath." 

With keen relish, then, Mary, heartily sec- 
onded by bishops, demanded Cranmer's death. 
The old man is thrown into prison, given a 
mock trial, cited to answer charges in Rome 
while still held fast in a distant city, induced 
to write and sign submission to the pope 
when the submission would do no good, 
and finally sentenced to be put to death. 
The archbishop begged time in which to 
make reparation for his former recantation of 
Protestantism ; signed a paper declaring his 
faith in and fidelity to the principles which 
he, in an hour of weakness, had shamefully 
denied; and, on March 21, 15 16, in the sixty- 
seventh year of his age, fell a martyr to the 
Protestant faith. 

Have we been grieved and mortified at 
Cranmer's weakness in life? We may well 1 
rejoice in Cranmer's heroism in death. It 
stands out and up in glorious contrast to the 
cowardice and vacillation that marred so 



56 Thomas Cranmer. 

sadly and so often the beauty of his Christian 
career; for Christian it was, with all its 
imperfections. What an illustration Cran- 
mer's last hours of Goldsmith's favorite say- 
ing, that the glory of a man is not in never 
falling, but in rising after he has fallen ! 
David and Peter each rise in penitence from 
sin and sorrow with grander purpose, and 
character made more noble through discipline 
and God's forgiving grace. So with the dying 
martyr before us this hour. He had fallen 
into shame; he now comes out of it, glori- 
ously redeeming the past. 

At the very place where brave Latimer 
and trustful Ridley had been put to death, and 
some twenty-one years after his own elevation 
to the archbishopric, Cranmer, without shoes 
and without hat, was chained to the stake, 
awaiting the. will of God. In that attitude, 
looking above in supplication, he offered, 
falling upon his knees, this fervent prayer 
of deep, unfeigned contrition: u O Father 
of heaven! O Son of God, Redeemer of the 
world! O Holy Ghost, proceeding from them 
both — three persons and one God! Have 



Thomas Cranmer. 57 

mercy upon me, most wretched caitiff and 
miserable sinner! I have offended both heaven 
and earth more than tongue can express. 
Whither shall I go, or whither flee for succor? 
To heaven I am ashamed to lift up mine eyes, 
and in earth I find no refuge. What, then, 
shall I do? Shall I despair? God forbid! 
O good God, thou art merciful, and refusest 
none that come to thee for succor. To thee, 
therefore, do I come. O Lord God, my sins 
are great; but yet have mercy upon me for 
thy great mercy. Thou didst not give thy 
Son unto death, O Heavenly Father, for our 
little and small sins only, but for all and the 
greatest of the world, so that the sinner re- 
turn and repent unto thee with his whole 
heart, as I do at present. I crave nothing, 
O Lord, for my own merits, but for thy name's 
sake, that it may be hallowed thereby, and for 
thy dear Son Jesus Christ. Amen." 

Rising from his knees, he looked around 
over the company, and spoke with his last 
earthly breath these memorable words, before 
the close of which he thrust into the flame, 
that it might first be consumed, the hand 



58 Thomas Cranmer. 

that aforetime had signed the recantation 
of the Protestant faith: "And now I come 
to the great thing that troubleth my con- 
science more than anything I ever did or 
said, even the setting forth of writings con- 
trary to the truth, which I now renounce and 
refuse — those things written by my own hand 
contrary to the truth I thought in my heart, 
and writ for fear of death and to save my life. 
And forasmuch as my hand offended in 
writing contrary to my heart, therefore my 
hand shall first be punished; for if I come to 
the fire, it shall first be burned. I refuse the 
pope utterly, as Christ's enemy and Antichrist, 
with all his false doctrine." 

With these words to man, and the prayer 
of Stephen to God — "Lord Jesus, receive my 
spirit" — Cranmer ascended on high in the 
radiant chariot-flame of martyrdom for God 
and truth. 

" Rooking upward, full of grace, 
He prayed; and from a happy place 
God's glory smote him on the face." 



III. 

JOHN KNOX. 

"He was a faithful man, and feared God above 
many." — Nehemiah vii, 2. 

IT means much that so judicious and dis- 
interested a writer as Froude, after desig- 
nating John Knox as the "one supremely 
great man that Scotland possessed — the one 
man without whom Scotland, as the modern 
world has known it, would have had no exist- 
ence," should indulge in a eulogy upon him 
so unreserved as this: "His was the voice 
that taught the peasant of the Lothians that 
he was a free man, the equal in the sight of 
God with the proudest peer or prelate that 
had trampled on his forefathers. He was the 
one antagonist that Mary Stuart could not 
soften nor Maitland deceive. He it was that 
raised the poor commons of his country into 
a stern and rugged people, who might be 
hard, narrow, superstitious, and fanatical, but 
who, nevertheless, were men whom neither 

59 



60 John Knox. 

king, noble, nor priest could force again to 
submit to tyranny." 

It means much, too, when so calm and 
critical a writer as Carlyle appears carried 
away, as by some irresistible tidal-wave, with 
the mighty effects of the reformation by Knox, 
denominating it "the one epoch in all the 
history of Scotland; an internal fire under 
the ribs of outward, material death; the no- 
blest of causes, kindling itself like a beacon 
set on high; high as heaven, yet all from 
earth, whereby the meanest man becomes not 
only a citizen, but a member of Christ's in- 
visible Church." 

Who is this man that is enabled, under 
God's guiding eye and protecting arm, to ac- 
complish so much for his native land, for the 
continent of Europe, for the Christian Church? 
Who is this man, the utterance of whose 
sentiments is felt even to this far-off age of 
ours, gathering force and momentum with all 
the years, producing in turn English Non- 
conforming Churches, Scotch Covenanters, 
and, in part, the principles upon which our 
own American Nation has been reared so 



John Knox. 6i 

gradually, grandly, and gloriously? Who is 
this man, without whose great brain, true 
heart, and imperishable deeds Scotland might 
have been lost to Protestantism in the most 
critical period of its eventful history, and in 
reference to whom a noted author has so 
forcefully declared the history of Scotland 
is the history of the Reformation, and the 
history of the Reformation is the biography 
of one man — John Knox? We can not fail 
to be interested in, and instructed by, the 
heroic career of this Savonarola of Scot- 
land — this John the Baptist of the sixteenth 
century. 

Like many of the great men of history that 
have stamped their generation with their per- 
sonal influence, Knox was born of bumble 
parents, who possessed neither rank nor repu- 
tation, fortune nor favor; and, like the most 
gifted of Greek bards, the most distinguished 
of Scotch reformers had a birthplace now 
unknown to the world — some historians 
contending that it was at Gifford, others 
that it was at Haddington, that our subject 
first saw the light, in 1505. It is inter- 



62 John Knox, 

esting to note how often from inconspicuous 
lineage and circumstances there arises con- 
spicuous genius, — Gregory VII, the son of a 
carpenter; Sextus V, a shepherd ; Adrian VI, 
a bargeman; Copernicus, the son of a baker; 
and Kepler, the son of a publican, — each add- 
ing force to the trite but true lines : 

"Honor and shame from no condition rise; 
Act well your part — there all the honor lies." 

The century whose opening days gave 
birth to Knox may be accounted one of the 
richest in all the annals of the human race. 
On to-morrow the world will be celebrating 
the birthday of Robert Burns, and orators will 
tell with fervid eloquence of how, around 
that proud year 1759, when the peasant 
poet was born, the great of earth did cluster 
in the glory of their personality and in the 
majesty of their achievements — Watt work- 
ing with steam, and Hargreaves with the 
spinning-jenny, and Wedgwood with household 
wares; Gray with his elegy, and Johnson with 
his dictionary; Edmund Burke with his essay 
on the sublime and beautiful; Garrick the 
first of actors, and Reynolds the first of paint- 



John Knox. 63 

ers; with Gibbon and Hume and Robertson 
as historians. A marvelous century indeed, 
laden with the fruit of exalted thought and 
labor. But a richer century in genius was 
that of Knox than that of Burns. In its 
broad compass this sixteenth century encircled 
Kepler and Copernicus, astronomers; Eliza- 
beth and Mary, queens; Wolsey, cardinal; 
Gustavus Adolphus, soldier; Shakespeare, 
Spenser, and Tasso, poets; Erasmus and 
Reuchlin, scholars; Angelo, Raphael, and Da 
Vinci, artists; Calvin and Luther, Zwingli 
and Melanchthon, reformers; and others, 
whom time prevents being mentioned here, 
high in rank in the realm of. art and science, 
of philosophy and literature, of war and states- 
manship, — a century blossoming with genius, 
even as gardens blossom with flowers. 

Well was it that in so rich a literary period 
Knox's parents put him, in his youth, at the 
Haddington school, whence, after his acquisi- 
tion of the principles of the Latin grammar, 
he entered, at the age of sixteen years, the 
University of Glasgow, where he prosecuted 
with marked vigor and success the studies as- 



64 John Knox. 

signed to him — most probably the Aristotelian 
philosophy, scholastic theology, and canon 
law — studies which fitted him afterwards to 
write on theology, discuss with heretics, con- 
front kings and queens, and, in a multitude of 
ways, bear a heroic part for God and humanity. 
And the condition of Scotland, both polit- 
ically and religiously, in the sixteenth century, 
how favorable in itself for the awakening of 
Knox's peculiar genius, the calling out of his 
special gifts, and the accomplishment of his 
reformatory deeds ! Look, first, at its political 
condition. Carlyle describes this country as 
"a poor, barren country, full of continual 
broils, dissensions, and massacrings; a people 
in the last stage of rudeness and destitution, 
little better perhaps than Ireland to-day; a 
country as yet without a soul, nothing developed 
in it but what was rude, external, semi-animal." 
A sad picture, this, by the sage of Chelsea, 
who loved so tenderly his own native land! 
It would seem that patriotism had well-nigh 
vanished from the heart and hearth-stones of 
this people, each inhabitant more a clansman 
than a Scotchman, and all the nation in an 



John Knox. 65 

indescribably sad, chaotic condition. Trnly, 
if any people ever needed God's pure and 
purifying leaven to permeate and save its 
heterogeneous mass, that nation was Scotland 
at the beginning of the sixteenth century. 

And Scotland religiously, or rather irre- 
ligiously, was worse even, if possible, than 
Scotland politically. No truer, more impress- 
ive picture of its moral state has been fur- 
nished than that given by the author of 
" Heretics of Yesterday," when he writes: 
" Nowhere, outside of Italy, was the Church 
so corrupt, or so shameless in its corruption. 
It held in its grasp the largest share of the 
wealth of the kingdom. The lives of its 
prelates and priests were scandalous to a de- 
gree that no language that is now permissible 
would enable us to express. Severe as the 
language of Knox was in the pulpit, and 
broad even almost to grossness as it now 
reads upon the pages of history, it is more 
than borne out in the stinging rhymes of that 
Chaucer of Scotland, Sir David lyindsay, of 
the Mount of St. Michael. Indeed, Chau- 
cer's most realistic pictures of the English 

5 



66 John Knox. 

priesthood of the fourteenth century are tame 
when compared with Sir David's description 
of the Scottish clergy in the sixteenth century. 
The Beatons, in licentiousness of life, in in- 
satiableness of avarice, and in the cruelty of 
their judicial murders, maintained the tradi- 
tions of a system made famous by John XXIII 
and Alexander VI. The Churches had ceased 
to be the resorts of men in need of spiritual 
grace or hungering for the bread of life, and 
had become mere marts for trafficking in in- 
dulgences, relics, anathemas, and the common 
clergy were themselves densely ignorant of 
the meaning of the prayers which they were 
paid to mumble." 

And all this sanctioned by Queen Mary of 
Guise and David Beaton, archbishop of St. 
Andrew's and cardinal of the Church! No, 
not of the Church, but of the so-called, be- 
cause so degenerated, Church of God. O holy 
Church of Christ ! what crimes have been com- 
mitted in thy name, and in thy name what mur- 
ders! Beaton, an archbishop, sanctioned and 
supported by the " Church," yet he prevailing, 
in the name of Jehovah, upon James V to vio- 



John Knox. 67 

late his promise to Henry VIII at Newcastle ; 
and, worse still, putting to death those whom 
he regarded heretics — pure Protestant heroes — 
with as little concern of conscience as the in- 
famous Nero murders his own mother, and 
wraps in flames, that give him joy, thousands 
of Roman saints! O, the dark, deep crimes 
that have drawn their trail of blood over the 
annals of history, and that, too, in the name 
of the gentle, unresisting, patient Christ, whose 
face was sculptured benevolence, whose hand 
was friendship's symbol, whose eye was liquid 
sympathy for human sorrow and woe! God 
save the Church from ever becoming again the 
mere marble effigy of an entombed excellence ! 
No wonder that the people of Scotland — 
political chaos on one hand, and moral cor- 
ruption on the other — are ready for a marked 
and growing revolution and reformation. 
Things must change, or the nation must sink. 
The foul, base murders by the papacy of 
George Wishart, the godly preacher of right- 
ousness, and of Patrick Hamilton, the gifted 
nobleman, have aroused the whole nation to 
a sense of their danger and to a need of cir- 



68 John Knox. 

cumspection. Formation had changed to def- 
ormation, now deformation mnst change to 
reformation. 

And how gloriously God has been preparing 
the land for the coming Reformation! First, 
Scotland has received from England some of 
Wycliffe's evangelical truths, which Lollards, 
full of sympathy with them, had scattered near 
and far; then, Scottish students have visited 
Wittenberg, and learned of Luther and Me- 
lanchthon, whose words, " half-battles," are 
arousing all Europe; then, there is the eleva- 
tion of the queen dowager to the Scottish and 
of Mary to the English throne — events which 
God, in his power, causes eventually to work 
for the Reformation; then, there is the diffu- 
sion of the Scriptures, the work of English 
and German reformers, which everywhere are 
the center of the world's illumination; then, 
there is the sympathy of such noblemen as 
William, earl of Glencairn, and William, earl 
of Enrol, and William, lord of Ruthven, and 
of such scholars as Sir David Lindsay, and 
Henry Balnaves, and George Buchanan, Knox's 
contemporary at Glasgow; then, there are the 



John Knox. 69 

plays of the pantomimes of satirists, in which 
the vices of the papal clergy and the suffer- 
ings of the Protestants were held up in bold, 
bald relief; then, there is the martyrdom of 
Wishart and Hamilton, whose blood truly be- 
came the seed of the Church, — 

"Who lived unknown till persecution 
Dragged them into fame, and chased them 
Up to heaven ; whose blood was shed 
In confirmation of the noblest claim — 
Our claim to feed upon the immortal truth, 
To soar, and to anticipate the skies." 

All this is just one year previous to the 
Diet of Spires — when the name Protestant 
was born — two years from the production of 
the Augsburg Confession, and eight years after 
IyUther had consigned to flame at Wittenberg 
the papal bulls; after which there is the 
opening up of the Castle of St. Andrew's as " a 
kind of sanctuary for all who were seeking 
relief or refuge from the oppression of rulers 
in Church and State," and the flocking to it 
of many noble and true spirits. 

Into this St. Andrew's castle Knox is one of 
the first to enter. He is now a man of forty- 



70 John Knox. 

two years, mature in wisdom and ripening in 
grace He has had fine advantages. At 
Glasgow University he has been under the 
careful instruction of John Major, doctor of 
the Sorbonne, principal of the university, and 
professor of divinity — a man who, abreast of 
his times, could project such truths as this in 
a period like that: "A free people first gives 
strength to a king, and a king depends for 
power upon a free people;" and, "A people 
can discard or depose a king and his children 
for misconduct, just as they appoint him at 
first." Such sentiments as these, taught by 
Major in the class-room, were reiterated by 
Knox with such mighty force, and so widely 
diffused in the nation, that u in due season 
the divine right of the Stuarts was exploded, 
and the beginning of a new order of things 
introduced." In the midst of a monarchical 
government such expositions of popular will 
and power could not fail to attract attention 
and demand consideration. 

It was in this St. Andrew's castle that 
Knox got his first strong, irresistible call to 
the public ministry of the Word. He has 



John Knox. 71 

already left the Romish priesthood, with 
which he was connected in 1543, and, under 
the influence of Thomas Guillaume and 
George Wishart and God's Spirit, received 
the truth as it is in Jesus. By degrees he 
finds himself greatly interested in giving pub- 
lic expositions of the Scripture and of the 
catechism. These public lectures receive 
profound attention. To them flock the most 
thoughtful minds in the castle. So deep and 
wide an impression is made by them that 
there comes to Knox, unsought, both a divine 
and human call to the ministry, from which 
now he can no more turn away than could 
the rude Gothic hordes of the North turn 
away from Italy after once their eyes had 
rested on its sunny slopes. The scene in the 
castle is unique, interesting, thrilling One 
morning John Rough, the regular preacher at 
the castle, preached a sermon on "Call to the 
Ministry." Turning at the close of his dis- 
course to Knox, who was seated near him, he 
addressed these words "Be not offended if I 
speak unto you personally. In the name of 
God and his Son Jesus Christ, and in the 



72 John Knox. 

names of these present who speak to you by 
my mouth, I charge you that you refuse not 
this holy vocation; but that, as you regard 
the glory of God, the increase of his king- 
dom, the edification of your brethren, you 
take upon you the public office and charge of 
preaching, even as you look to avoid God's 
displeasure, and desire that he multiply his 
graces with you." Then, looking over the 
congregation, Rough put this question: "Was 
not this your charge to me?" Unitedly their 
voices responded: "It was, and we approve 
it." What was the effect of all this upon 
Knox? We are reminded, as we look upon 
him in these circumstances, of two other great 
heroes of history in similar conditions, the one 
exclaiming, Ah, Lord God, behold! I can not 
speak, for I am a child!" the other, "Who is 
sufficient for these things?" Picturesquely has 
a biographer set before us Knox's emotions at 
this time "The combined suddenness and 
solemnity of the appeal completely unmanned 
him. He burst into tears, and hastened to 
his closet, where we may well believe he 
sought light from God; and the result was 



John Knox. 73 

that he was led to take up that ministry 
which he laid down only with his life. Not 
from the impulse of caprice, nor because he 
desired the position of a preacher, but because 
he could not otherwise meet the responsibility 
which God had laid upon him, did he enter 
upon that high and honorable vocation. He 
was to do a work for his countrymen not un- 
like that which Moses was to do for his kins- 
men; and so, like Moses, he was called to 
it in the full maturity of his powers, and 
entered upon it with a conviction that God 
had given him his commission and he dared 
not disobey." No wonder that, like Saul of 
Tarsus — converted on the way to Damascus, 
and straightway preaching in the synagogue 
that Jesus is the Christ — Knox now, without 
delay, goes forth to engage in a controversy 
with the papist Dean Armand, to deliver ser- 
mons exploding papal doctrine respecting 
justification, and to inculcate God's Word 
largely untainted by human tradition; and 
all this so conscientiously and vigorously that 
one present at one of his discourses sigifi- 
cantly cried out: "Others lopped off the 



74 John Knox. 

branches of papistry, but Knox strikes at the 
roots to destroy the whole !" He is not a 
man to mince words, wink at error, court 
favor, seek popularity. Having as a posses- 
sion a good God, a good conscience, and a 
good cause, this preacher of truth and right- 
ousness goes forth in courage, victorious for 
Jehovah and Scotland. 

But Knox's path of duty is no primrose 
way. God has raised him up for great deeds, 
and so must refine him and purify him in the 
fire of great suffering. Following the death 
of Henry VIII in England in 1547, and, in 
the same year, that of Francis I of France, 
who was succeeded by Henry II, St. Andrew's 
castle, where Knox had done such noble work 
for truth, was besieged by a fleet of French 
galleys, under whose attack the castle was 
surrendered. The vanquished were carried 
away in vessels, some to Cherbourg, others to 
St. Michael's Mount; Knox himself, because 
a prominent Protestant leader, being thrown 
as a slave in the galleys. What that means 
may be inferred from a description given us 
by a well known author: "The life of a galley- 



John Knox. 75 

slave was peculiarly calculated to crush the 
very spirit out of a man. As a punishment 
it was brutal and imbruting — the men chained 
together and to their oars, with insufficient 
room for any muscular action, sometimes 
under a stifling deck; compelled oftentimes 
to tug at the oars without cessation for twenty- 
four hours together; their very food put into 
their mouths by their masters; the slightest 
relaxation of effort visited by stinging lashes; 
if one sank exhausted he was speedily thrown 
overboard, and another chained in in his 
place; all this tending first to embitter, then 
dehumanize and make ferocious, and finally 
stupefy." Is it strange that Knox is stricken 
with fever, and becomes painfully emaciated? 
How pathetically does he speak of his bitter 
experiences in these circumstances of woe! 
"In this town and Church," writes he, in re- 
lation to St. Andrew's, "began God first to 
call me to the dignity of a preacher, from, the 
which I was reft by the tyranny of France, 
by procurement of bishops, as ye all well know. 
How long I continued prisoner, what torments 
I endured in the galleys, and what were the 



76 John Knox. 

sobs of my heart, is now no time to consider." 
O, how true it is that God's servants must 
suffer from God's enemies for God's truth — 
Daniel in a den, and the Hebrew children in 
flames of persecution; Stephen dying from the 
blows of an infuriated mob, and Paul chained 
in a Roman cell, and martyred, probably, on 
a Roman arena; Peter ascending to glory from 
a tree of crucifixion, and John an exile on 
Patmos' lonely isle; Cranmer and Bradford 
expiring in flames, and Hooper on the scaffold ; 
Tauler cast in the Strasburg cathedral, and 
Latimer in the London tower; Huguenots per- 
secuted in the hiding-places of the Pyrenees, 
and Waldenses in the fastnesses of the Pied- 
mont, — and so all down the ages! We suffer 
with God that we may be also glorified with 
him. 

But though in chains and racked with 
fever, during his confinement, Knox uses his 
pen to propagate truth. Hear his dedication 
to Balnave's ''Treatise on Justification" — how 
Paul-like in form and spirit: "John Knox, 
the bound-servant of Jesus Christ, unto his 
beloved brethren of St. Andrew's congrega- 



John Knox. 77 

tion, and to all professors of Christ's true 
evangel ; grace, mercy, and peace from God 
the Father, with perpetual consolation from 
the Holy Spirit!" Are we surprised at his 
calm, tranquil resignation and faith amid con- 
ditions so hard? Was it not in a dungeon 
that Savonarola wrote his commentary on 
Psalm xxxi, and George Withers his " Med- 
itations," and Sir Francis Baker his " Jeru- 
salem, my happy home," and Judson his 
"Lord's Prayer Paraphrase," and Bunyan his 
marvelous allegory, and Madame Guyon her 
song of triumph : 

" These prison walls can not control 
The flight, the freedom of my soul?" 

What a commentary, each of these cases, on 
the word of Him whom Galilean winds and 
waves obeyed, "L,o, I am with you alway." 

And the faith of Knox while in base and 
bitter confinement, how unshaken, both in 
God and in his own future success! It re- 
minds us of Daniel's fortitude before the 
king, and Paul's courage amid billows. "I 
dare be bold," exclaims he, "in the verity of 
God's promise, that, notwithstanding the 



78 John Knox. 

vehemence of trouble, the long continuance 
thereof, the dispersion of all men, the fearful- 
ness, danger, dolor, and anguish of our hearts, 
yet if we call constantly to God, he shall de- 
liver us beyond expectation of men." And 
this courageous faith was not spasmodic, but 
continuous and increasing. One day, while 
the vessel in which he was a galley-slave lay 
near St. Andrew's, he catches a glimpse of the 
town spires, and, with genuine enthusiasm, 
breaks out triumphantly: "I see the steeple 
of that place where God first opened my 
mouth in public to his glory, and I am fully 
persuaded, however weak I now appear, that 
I shall not depart this life till my tongue shall 
glorify his holy name in the same place." 

And this triumphant declaration is a 
prophecy of what, in God's good time, will 
come to pass. By some means, which history 
does not relate, Knox, pale and emaciated, is 
finally released from the galleys, and enters 
upon the most memorable career of his 
checkered life. He tells us that he was ''ap- 
pointed preacher to Berwick, then to New- 
castle, at last called to London, remaining 



John Knox. 79 

there till the death of Edward VI." His 
work, both at Berwick and Newcastle, is 
characterized by the same fervid eloquence 
and personal intrepidity that we have found 
marking him in the past. It is in the latter 
place, and when surrounded by strong, bitter 
ecclesiastical foes, that he gives expression to 
that unanswerable syllogism on the mass, 
which shows him to be in advance even of 
Cranmer on this question : " All worshiping, 
honoring, or serving invented by the brain of 
man, in the religion of God, without his ex- 
press command, is idolatry; the mass is in- 
vented by the brain of man, without the 
command of God ; therefore, the mass is idol- 
atry." A syllogism whose major and minor 
premises are absolutely invulnerable, and 
whose conclusion is a logical sequence from 
these premises. 

Bloody Mary coming to the throne, Knox 
prudently departs to the Continent. Here, 
especially in Geneva, as in England and Scot- 
land, we find him industrious, consecrated, 
fearless, in all his work — now in company 
with Calvin; now, though fifty years old, ap- 



80 John Knox. 

plying himself to Hebrew as though a youth; 
now aiding in the translation of the Genevan 
Bible ; now helping to form the liturgy of the 
Scottish Reformed Church. 

But this man of God and child of Scotland 
is not to spend all his best days away from 
his native land; and so, after about twelve 
years passed as an exile, he returns to Scot- 
land. Mary of Guise is regent. After a brief 
reign she dies. Mary, Queen of Scots, takes 
her place — Mary, young, fair, and fascinating, 
but cruel and cunning. What a woman she 
was! — "beautiful in person, attractive in man- 
ner, acute in intellect, she might have been 
an ornament to the Church of God and to all 
her realm ; but brought up in a French court, 
her moral code neither high nor pure, edu- 
cated to believe that the one supreme con- 
cern was to advance the interests of the Ro- 
man Catholic Church, sister-in-law to him 
whose name is forever blackened by the St. 
Bartholomew's massacre, she set heart on 
either fascinating Protestantism by the spell 
of her personal magnetism, or crushing it by 
her power — making the throne of Scotland a 



John Knox. 8i 

stepping-stone to that of England, and so 
bringing that realm back again to papal alle- 
giance." 

But Knox is a wrong man for even a queen 
like Mary to confront. Knox and Mary are 
antipodal in creed and purpose — the one a 
devoted Protestant; the other an ardent Ro- 
manist. For them not to clash is an impos- 
sibility. Indeed, the very week after Mary's 
arrival in Scotland she gives order that a sol- 
emn mass be celebrated in the chapel of 
Holyrood. By a law passed by Parliament 
in 1560 this was unlawful, but what cared 
Mary for that? The mass is celebrated. The 
whole country is agitated. Knox himself is 
aroused. He regards the act an insult to the 
nation and blasphemy against God. On the 
following Sunday, publicly and eloquently, he 
denounces the whole thing, without reserva- 
tion or equivocation. Mary is indignant. She 
sends for the fearless innovator. He readily 
responds to the call. Lord James Stuart is 
present at the interview. Mary charges Knox 
with preaching doctrines not allowed by his 
superior in religion. Knox denies that he has 



82 John Knox. 

any superior in religion, save God only. She 
puts to him the question: "What is the true 
Church of God?" He answered: " Search 
the Scriptures and find out." She, outwitted 
at every point, admits that she can not argue 
with him, but declares that there are some ol 
her spiritual advisers who can. Knox re- 
sponds: "I will meet, at any time you say, 
the learnedest papist in Europe." Mary re- 
plies: "You may get that privilege sooner 
than you think." He retorts: "If so, it 
will be sooner than I believe;" and then, turn- 
ing away, he leaves the queen with the words, 
"Madam, I pray God that you may be as 
blessed in the commonwealth as Deborah was 
to the nation of Israel!" 

This is the first of the six interviews be- 
tween Mary and Knox, but it illustrates all 
the rest. At times, as they confronted each 
other, Mary would burst out in tears, and 
Knox would stand motionless till she recov- 
ered from her passion or confusion. They 
can not agree. They have no common ground. 
Mary for "loyalty to the Romish Church;" 



John Knox. 83 

Knox for " loyalty to God and his eternal 
truth." His triumph over the queen gives 
him a national reputation. Crowds, three 
thousand in number at times, press within 
the walls of old St. Giles to hear his burning 
words. He develops in power, in favor with 
God and man. His name and fame grow 
with increasing greatness and glory. He 
holds a ministry in Edinburgh from 1564 to 
1570, during which period are enacted strange, 
sad scenes, concisely summed up thus by a 
historian: On June 19, 1566, the birth of 
James VI; on February 9, 1567, the murder 
of Darnley; on May 15, 1567, the marriage of 
Mary to Bothwell; on June 15, 1567, Mary's 
surrender to the Carbery Hill lords; on July 
24, 1567, Mary's abdication of her throne, 
after her imprisonment at Loch L,even castle; 
on May 2, 1568, Mary's escape from confine- 
ment; on May 13, 1568, her defeat, with all 
her forces, at Langside; and, finally, her 
martyrdom on the Fotheringay block. The 
1560 Parliament act is finally ratified, with an 
added clause that "no prince shall hereafter 



84 John Knox. 

be admitted to exercise authority in the king- 
dom without taking an oath to maintain the 
Protestant religion." 

Knox, through his own personal devotion 
to truth and God's great might, which is al- 
ways on the side of truth, has won the victory 
for the Reformation, and is hereafter to take 
his place even* alongside the noble German 
reformer, Martin L,uther. His work is now 
done. His hand may now rest. His eyes 
may now close. His heart may now cease to 
beat. On November 24, 1572, the summons 
comes to him from the great Captain of his 
salvation to lay aside his sword of warfare 
for a fadeless chaplet of victory; which sum- 
mons he gladly obeys, like Paul, reviewing 
his course with joy. Hear his words just be- 
fore his spirit takes its flight to enjoy eternal 
reward: "I profess before God and his holy 
angels that I never made merchandise of the 
sacred work of God; never studied to please 
men ; never indulged my own private passions 
or those of others, but rejoice in the testimony 
of a good conscience." Who wonders that 
on that solemn November day, as the mortal 



John Knox, 85 

remains of John Knox were lowered to their 
last resting-place in the old church-yard of 
St. Giles, the Earl of Morton should be heard 
uttering these words, slowly and feelingly: 
"Here lieth a man who in his life never feared 
the face of man; who hath often been threat- 
ened with dagge and dagger, but yet hath 
ended his days in peace and honor." 

Analyzing, in conclusion, Knox's character, 
we are impressed, first of all, by his conse- 
crated activity. Truly, the zeal of Jehovah 
consumed him. We find him at times during 
his career preaching every Sunday, and three 
times besides during the week. Once each 
week he would hold a conference with his 
elders, and once each week a conference with 
ministers for the study of the Scriptures. 
Only one sermon did he publish, but in that 
one he tells of the great, increasing purpose 
that ran through his life — "to instruct the 
ignorant, comfort the sorrowful, confirm the 
weak, and to rebuke the proud by pen and 
living voice;" and to this high vocation he 
devoted his days to preaching and his nights 
to writing. It was as a preacher, and not as 



86 John Knox. 

a writer, that he did his grandest work. Dr. 
Taylor has well said: "The pulpit was the 
throne of his peculiar and pre-eminent power. 
Other men might equal or surpass him else- 
where, but there he was supreme. The pul- 
pit was the glass which focused all his powers 
into a point, and quickened their exercise 
into a burning intensity which kindled every- 
thing he touched. It brightened his intellect, 
enlivened his imagination, clarified his judg- 
ment, inflamed his courage, and gave fiery en- 
ergy to his utterance." He was a born 
preacher, as Tennyson is a born poet, and 
Gladstone a born statesman. No wonder 
that, even with the disadvantage of a weak 
body and of a ministry not beginning until 
he was forty-five years old and ending at 
sixty-seven ; and of the further fact that these 
twenty-five years were sadly interrupted — two 
in slavery, five in England, three on the Con- 
tinent, and two made almost ineffectual by 
paralysis, — Knox was enabled to do a work 
that elevated all Scotland, and thrilled the 
very eternities with joy and salvation. 

Again, like Luther, Knox was a man of 



John Knox. 87 

notable, marvelous moral courage, the out- 
growth of an ever-developing faith in God. 
See him in his earlier life going before George 
Wishart with a two-branded sword, and pro- 
tecting his friend as he preached the gospel. 
Study a little, but significant, incident con- 
nected with him as a galley-slave at Nantes. 
An image of the Virgin Mary is held before 
him, and he commanded to kiss it. Refusing 
immediately and peremptorily, he is told to at 
least handle it, when, taking up the image, 
he throws it w T ith force into the water, ex- 
claiming, with an Elijah-like irony, as he 
hears it splash in the water: "Let our lady 
now save herself, if she be a god; she is light 
enough, let her swim!" He himself tells of 
the incident, adding, with quiet humor: " After 
that, no other Scotchman was urged with 
idolatry." Once, during an address, strong 
and even vehement, before Queen Mary, Knox 
is interrupted by one of the nobles with the 
words: "You forget yourself; you are not in 
your pulpit!" "That is true," replied our 
hero, "but I am in the place where I am 
demanded by my conscience to speak the 



88 John Knox. 

truth, and therefore the truth I speak ; impugn 
it whoso list." 

Are we surprised at times at Knox's lan- 
guage — when, for example, he speaks of 
" Gardiner, and his black brood," and of the 
wafer of the host as "the round-clipped god;" 
declares that "the wily devil rageth in his 
obedient servants, cruel Winchester, dreaming 
Durham, bloody Bonner, with the rest of the 
bloody, butchering brood;" and that "Jezebel 
never erected half so many gallows in all 
Israel as mischievous Mary hath erected 
in London alone," — let us bear in mind 
that all this was true, and that Knox was 
raised up and educated of God to tell the 
truth, come what might — anger to a queen, 
or death to himself. He had learned, he tells 
us, "from Isaiah and Jeremiah and others to 
call a spade a spade," and it was awkward 
for him to denominate it an agricultural im- 
plement. Life to him was too real and ear- 
nest to ever encourage duplicity, insincerity, 
cowardice. Like Cromwell's Ironsides, he 
was dispossessed of all fear of man, and fully 
possessed of the true fear of God. And yet, 



John Knox, 89 

as -another has beautifully said, Knox was no 
heartless Stoic; but rather, like the granite 
mountains of his native land, he had, within 
all his strength and sublimity, fountains of 
tenderness and valleys laughing with cheer. 
McCrie sums his nature up in the forceful 
declaration that he was austere, but not un- 
feeling; stern, but not savage; vehement, but 
not vindictive. Beneath all his sternness of 
face and manner there was a heart of tender- 
ness and deep emotion. 

But with all Knox's superb virtues, like 
all other men, he had his faults. We would 
not conceal the error of which he was guilty 
in the publication of his u First Blast of the 
Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of 
Women," a work produced when burning 
with righteous indignation at the atrocities of 
Bloody Mary, and his unwilling exile from the 
land in which he yearned to labor. As illus- 
trative of its trend, take one sentence: "To 
promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, 
dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, 
or city, is repugnant to nature, contumely 
against God, and a subversion of all good 



90 John Knox. 

order, of all equality and justice." Knox 
subsequently realized the mistake lie had 
made in his composition, and candidly de- 
clares: "My first blast hath blown from me 
all my friends." But this was not Knox's 
greatest error. We find him, in 1560, guilty 
of a deception which can not be overlooked 
nor excused. It is where, for the sake of 
advancing the Reformation's cause, he ad- 
vises Sir James Craft to deceive the Govern- 
ment by claiming that certain men, whose 
help he needed, were enemies of the Refor- 
mation, and thereby save them from suspi- 
cions. A sad, sorrowful sin ! How weak poor 
human nature at its very best! How much 
evil mixed with good! How the light is at- 
tended by shadows! How near to the finest 
fiber is oftentimes the flaw! How many the 
limitations of the most finely tempered in- 
tegrity! Abraham, Moses, Paul, John, IyUther, 
Cranmer, Knox — how each, though possessed 
of mighty strength, had weaknesses which 
may neither be extenuated nor vindicated, 
but must be confessed and lamented ! But 
casting over Knox's faults and frailties a veil 



John Knox, 91 

of charity, and recalling with joy and inspi- 
ration his qualities of such greatness and 
glory, we think of him this hour as at rest 
from all his labors, and free from all his frail- 
ties — an emancipated, triumphant spirit in the 
presence of his King. 

"Servant of God, well done! 
Rest from thy loved employ ; 
The battle fought, the victory won, 
Enter thy Master's joy. 

Soldier of Christ, well done! 

Praise be thy new employ; 
And, while eternal ages run, 

Rest in thy Savior's joy." 



IV. 

JOHN" WESLEY. 

"He was a good man, and full of the Holy Spirit 
and of faith." — Acts xi, 24. 

IN a noted English review a critic has 
written thus depreciatingly of the eight- 
eenth century: "Never has century risen on 
Christian England so devoid of soul and faith 
as that which opened with Queen Anne, and 
reached its misty noon beneath the second 
George — a dewless night, succeeded by a sun- 
less dawn. There was no freshness in the 
past, no promise in the future." The criti- 
cism is just only as it has reference to the 
beginning of the eighteenth century. With 
its evolution came mighty developments, both 
in individual and national history. We have 
but to mention men and deeds of that period 
to be impressed by their historic importance. 
It was the century, along with other great 
movements, of the French Revolution, of the 
wars of the Spanish and Austrian Successions, 

93 



94 John Wesley, 

of the Seven Years' War, of the Reign of 
Terror, of England's establishment of British 
power in India, of the American Revolution, 
and of the American Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. 

And what men there were in this century! 
In philosophy, Leibnitz and Kant; in litera- 
ture, Addison, Johnson, De Stael; in criti- 
cism, Voltaire and Lessing; in science, New- 
ton and Franklin, Humboldt and Cuvier; in 
poetry, Goethe, Schiller, Pope, and Gray; in 
music, Handel and Beethoven; in history, 
Hume and Gibbon; in statesmanship, Pitt 
and Washington; in war, Wellington, Fred- 
erick the Great, and Napoleon; in religion, 
John Wesley. 

And among all these mighty names just 
announced, there is none greater and nobler, 
as God counts greatness and nobility, than 
that of the Christian hero and reformer, John 
Benjamin Wesley. Others were great musi- 
cians, great poets, great scholars, great scien- 
tists, great warriors, but Wesley stands out 
among them and above them all — Addison, 
Johnson, Voltaire, Cuvier, Goethe, Beethoven, 



John Wesley. 95 

Hume, Wellington, Frederick, Napoleon — the 
greatest man; most conspicuous in that man- 
liness which lies at the basis of human char- 
acter, and to which the noble and true of 
earth have always delighted to pay homage 
and admiration. Eloquently have Goethe and 
Wesley — the two most colossal figures of this 
period — been thus compared and contrasted: 
Goethe the apostle of self-culture, Wesley 
proclaiming anew the possibility of the soul's 
perfection in Christ; Goethe's life devoted 
primarily to intellectual development, Wesley's 
to soul-husbandry; Goethe's theory self-cen- 
tered, Wesley's God-centered. It is no sur- 
prise to us to read from the writings of 
Southey the exalted encomium: "John Wes- 
ley will exercise more influence centuries, and 
perhaps millenniums, hence, if the present 
race continues, than any other man of his 
age." We do not wonder that even L,ecky, 
an avowed rationalist, furnishes this high 
testimony: "Although the career of the elder 
Pitt, and the splendid victories by land and 
sea that were won during his ministry, form 
unquestionably the most dazzling episodes in 



96 John Wesley. 

the reign of George II, they must yield, I 
think, in real importance to that religious 
revolution which shortly before had begun in 
England by the preaching of the Wesleys and 
Whitefield. Few things," he adds, "in ec- 
clesiastical history are more striking than the 
energy and the success with which Wesley 
propagated his opinions. He was gifted with 
a frame of iron, and with spirits that never 
nagged." 

We shall catch inspiration to think and 
achieve nobler and grander things as we study 
with delight the career of this preacher, evan- 
gelist, philanthropist, reformer. 

John Wesley was born June 17, 1703, and 
died March 2, 1791, thus making the opening 
decade of the eighteenth century richer by 
his birth, the closing decade poorer by his 
death, and the decades intervening between 
the opening and the closing nobler by his 
work. It was at Epworth, England, that he 
first saw the light; because of which fact 
there cluster round this spot, even to-day, 
many hallowed and hallowing associations. 
Like Jonathan Edwards, whom we next study, 



John Wesley. 97 

Wesley came from a noble ancestry, of whose 
connection with the Non-conformist persecu- 
tion and controversy in the seventeenth cen- 
tury we have such vivid portraits; and, like 
Edwards, he was peculiarly indebted for the 
formation of his character and the higher im- 
pulses of his being to a royal mother, the 
daughter of Dr. Samuel Annesley, vicar of 
St. Giles, and the St. Paul of the Non-con- 
formists. The learned commentator, Adam 
Clarke, declared that he never knew or heard 
of the equal of Susanna Annesley Wesley. 
With truth Isaac Taylor says: "The Wesleys' 
mother was the mother of Methodism in a 
religious and moral sense; for her courage, 
her submissiveness to authority, the high tone 
of her mind, its independence and self-con- 
trol, the warmth of her devotional feelings, 
were vividly repeated in the character and 
conduct of her sons." A woman combining 
in a remarkable degree sound judgment, in- 
tellectual strength, deep piety, constant devo- 
tion to duty, Mrs. Wesley reared to maturity 
ten of her nineteen children, and lived to see 
each of them an ornament in the home, and 

7 



98 John Wesley. 

a worthy follower of trie Lord Jesus Christ. 
Especially dear to his mother's heart was 
John, because, at the age of six years, the 
boy narrowly escaped being burned to death 
in the rectory. "I do intend," writes Mrs. 
Wesley, two years after the calamity, u to be 
more particularly careful of the soul of this 
child, whom God has so mercifully provided 
for, than I have ever been, that I may do my 
duty in instilling into his mind the principles 
of religion and virtue." Who shall ever know 
the extent of the influence of this maternal 
solicitude upon the beautiful, consecrated life 
of this holy man of God ! 

Passing over, full though they be of inter- 
est, Wesley's school days at Charter-house, we 
come to his college days at Oxford, which in- 
stitution he entered in 1720, and where, for 
fifteen years, both as student and teacher, he 
faithfully developed his mind, and broadened 
the range of his intellectual and spiritual 
vision. Here, at the age of seventeen, he 
makes a deep impression upon his colleagues 
as a youth of fine gifts and sterling worth. 
When twenty-one years of age he is described 



John Wesley, 99 

as "gay and sprightly, with a turn for wit 
and humor; a sensible and acute logician, 
baffling every man by the subtleties of logic, 
and laughing at him for being so easily 
routed; a young fellow of the finest classical 
taste, of the most liberal and manly senti- 
ments." His gifts as a poet began to develop 
at this period, his father commending his 
verses, and urging him to catch more and 
more inspiration from the muse, that he might 
bring more and more glory to God. And to 
this religious sentiment of his father, Wesley 
naturally and heartily responded. He is 
found at this time a close student of Thomas 
a Kempis's "Imitation of Christ," and Jeremy 
Taylor's "Holy Living and Dying," two 
works which so influence him that he soon 
joyously and freely gives expression to this 
resolution: "I hereby pledge and devote all 
my life to God, all my thoughts and words 
and actions, being thoroughly convinced that 
there is no medium, but that every part of 
my life must be a service to God, or to my- 
self, which is, in effect, to the devil." This 
resolution was early followed by his ready 



ioo John Wesley. 

submission to ordination as a Christian min- 
ister, in the year 1725; and in 1726 he was 
unanimously elected Fellow of Lincoln Col- 
lege. It was at this time that Wesley adopted 
that motto, which ever since has been inti- 
mately associated with his great, generous 
name and nature: ''Leisure and I have taken 
leave of one another. I propose to be busy as 
long as I live." 

So assiduously and successfully does he 
apply himself to his life vocation that we find 
him rising gradually and grandly all the time — 
now chosen Greek Lecturer and Moderator of 
the Classes; now made Master of Arts; now a 
distinguished lecturer on Natural Philosophy, 
on Moral Philosophy, and on the Christian Re- 
ligion. At the age of twenty-six Wesley be- 
comes associated with a little society at Ox- 
ford, whose name — Methodism — has furnished 
designation and impulse to one of the largest 
and most aggressive Church bodies of to-day. 
No Church was this organization, but only a 
society established to advance a fourfold pur- 
pose — Bible study, classical knowledge, per- 
sonal piety, and practical philanthropy. Re- 



John Wesley. ioi 

markablylike this body are the Russian Stund- 
ists, at this very hour suffering such persecu- 
tions. At first this society was composed of 
only four Christian young men — William Mor- 
gan, Robert Kentham, Charles and John Wes- 
ley. So methodical were these youths in all 
departments of their study and work, especially 
in the matter of religious duties, that it be- 
came the custom to call them " Methodists," 
or methodical men. This, however, was not 
the only name given these worthy Christian 
heroes by their unworthy, worldly critics. 
They were called also "Reforming Club," 
"Godly Club," "Holy Club," "Bible Moths," 
"Enthusiasts," and "Fanatics." But caring 
nothing for these sneers and insinuations, 
these youths advanced all the time in the 
beauty of personal character and the glory of 
philanthropic deeds, the Wesleys naturally and 
successfully their leaders. 

On October 31, 1735, John Wesley, with 
his brother Charles, set sail for the United 
States, to labor as missionaries among the 
Georgian Indians. Early in 1734 a small 
colony of German Protestants, driven out of 



102 John Wesley. 

Salzburg because of their renunciation of the 
papacy, had settled in Georgia. Then a 
British colony came ; then Scotch Highlanders 
and Moravians, — each to do God's work for a 
destitute continent. 

On this journey across the sea we have a 
glimpse of the ceaseless activity of the Wes- 
ley brothers. Rising at four o'clock each 
morning, they spend two hours in Scripture 
study aud prayer; at seven, take breakfast; 
at eight, hold public worship; from nine to 
twelve, study separately — John learning Ger- 
man, Charles writing sermons ; at twelve, read 
and pray together an hour; at one, eat din- 
ner; from two till five, engage in Christian 
work among the passengers; from five to six, 
spend in retirement and meditation ; at seven, 
attend Moravian services; from eight to nine, 
spend in private devotion; and at nine, go to 
bed, A full day indeed ; and yet this is but 
a sample of John Wesley's constant, consci- 
entious service for God and humanity. What 
a beautiful answer was that he once made to 
a friend, who asked him how he would spend 
tfie next few hours if he knew he would die 



John Wesley. 103 

at the expiration of them: "Why, just as I 
now intend to spend them — preach this even- 
ing at Gloucester, arise at five o'clock to-mor- 
row morning, ride to Tewksbury, preach in 
the afternoon, meet the societies, repair to 
friend Martin's house, take tea, converse and 
pray with the family, at ten o'clock retire to 
my room, commend myself to my Heavenly 
Father, lie down to rest, and wake up in 
glory." Ah, indeed, this is like Enoch of old, 
walking with God hour by hour, until at last 
the two pass through the gates of death into 
the gates of pearl, and continue their walk 
together for ever and ever on streets of gold, 
amid walls of jasper, by streams of crystal 
and thrones of glory! 

Think of this heroic soul, during the fifty- 
five years of his Christian ministry, traveling, 
chiefly on horseback, over three hundred thou- 
sand miles ; delivering forty thousand sermons ; 
writing two hundred works of real merit; 
forming Christian classes numbering one hun- 
dred and thirty thousand; and looking down 
this hour upon his spiritual and ecclesiastical 
descendants, organized into bodies, whose con- 



104 John Wesley. 

stituents number more than five millions — a 
Church, as has been well said, belting the 
globe with a zone of prayer and an atmos- 
phere of praise. Truly, in Wesley's case, 
we find a verification of Jehovah's gracious 
declaration: "My word shall not return to me 
void, but shall accomplish that whereunto I 
sent it." 

Returning to Iyondon in 1738 — for Wesley's 
mission to the Indians was not remarkably 
successful — our present subject seems to be 
in the throes of mental agony in relation to 
his spiritual condition. "I went to America 
to convert the Indians," we hear him cry out; 
"but O, who shall convert me?" Concluding 
that he was unfit to preach the gospel, he 
consults with an old friend, Bohler, still con- 
nected with Oxford. Hear him asking, in 
great seriousness, "What shall I do?" "Do? 
Why, preach." "Preach what?" "Faith." 
"But how, if I myself have not faith?" 
"Preach, then, until you get it; and then, be- 
cause you have it, you will preach it." Wes- 
ley follows the advice. He lives up to the 
light he has, and greater light breaks upon 



John Wesley. 105 

him. It is another case of the Roman Cor- 
nelius, the English Robertson, the American 
Bushnell. 

And well was it for Wesley that this new 
experience had come; for what a vast, difficult 
work lies before him — the reclamation and 
renovation, through God's great might, of the 1 
degenerated moral life of England! How 
sorely England needed and pathetically de- 
manded this reclamation may be known from 
the testimony of unbiased historians. Says 
Southey: "There never was less religious 
feeling, either within or without the Estab- 
lishment, than when Wesley blew his trumpet, 
and awakened those that slept." Archbishop 
Seeker declares that everywhere there was an 
open and professed disregard of religion; 
and Blackstone, in 1760, asserts that, among 
all the English preachers, he had "heard not 
a single discourse which had in it more Chris- 
tianity than the writings of Cicero; and that 
it would be impossible for him to discover, 
from what he heard, whether the preacher 
were a follower of Confucius, Mohammed, or 
Christ." It is the testimony of Isaac Taylor 



106 John Wesley: 

that the people of England had lapsed into 
heathenism, or a state hardly distinguishable 
from it. If ever the Christian Church, in all 
its history, needed awakening from spiritual 
lethargy and infamous criminality, it was in 
this eighteenth century. 

And out of the Church, what a condition 
of things! To quote another here: "It was 
an age of unbounded extravagance and world- 
liness. Material splendor was a grand pas- 
sion, and, next to that, indulgence in gross 
passion. Gambling was an almost universal 
practice among men and women alike. Both 
sexes were given to profanity and to drunk- 
enness. Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marl- 
borough, could swear more bravely than her 
husband could fight. The wages of the poor 
were spent in guzzling beer at merry-makings, 
in wakes and fairs, badger-baitings and cock- 
fights." Who is surprised at this picture, 
given us in "Heretics of Yesterday," when he 
recalls that in 1736 every sixth or seventh 
house in London was a gin-shop, most of 
them bearing the sign: "Come in, and get 



John Wesley. 107 

drunk for a penny; dead drunk for two pen- 
nies; no cost for straw!" Once let the vile 
grog-shop get ascendency and there is no 
limit to profligacy and crime; and at this 
time England was consuming yearly no fewer 
than seven million gallons of the dementing, 
damning stuff. The fact is, the whole nation 
was sunk deep in degradation, and the whole 
Church presented a picture almost too base for 
language to depict. 

Truly, the times are ripe for an awakening, 
and God prepares the way. Whitefield comes 
from Georgia. Wesley finds him. A confer- 
ence is held. Whitefield preaches the simple, 
God-honored and God-honoring gospel. At 
first, two hundred people go to hear his fer- 
vid utterances; then, two thousand; then, 
ten thousand. So mighty and marvelous is 
the success of Wesley at the same time that 
we have the record that, " after the service, 
the fields were white with people praising 
God." Under the great strain, Wesley is sus- 
tained as never before. "O, how God," ex- 
claims he, "has renewed my strength, so that 



108 John Wesley. 

I preach twice a day without fatigue!" He 
joyously realizes the truth of that comforting 
declaration: "As thy days are, so shall thy 
strength be." 

And Wesley studiously prepared himself 
for his great vocation. His chosen library 
was not large, but carefully selected and 
studiously used — four books on divinity, four 
on physics, two on natural philosophy, one 
on astronomy, one on history, two on poetry, 
ten on Latin, twelve on Greek, one on He- 
brew. Mastering these, he went forth as 
God's servant and ambassador, conquering and 
to conquer. 

The effect of Wesley's sermons was pow- 
erful. He was unlike both Whitefield and 
his brother Charles — Whitefield being a fervid 
and eloquent speaker, and Charles a man of 
tender emotion, swaying the multitudes at 
will, while John, the Bacon among the 
preachers of that day, used reason more than 
eloquence, and, by his wonderful powers of 
logic, carried his point with vigor in every 
case. He himself describes the effect of one 



John Wesley. 109 

of his sermons, when, as he was preaching, 
"tears and groans were heard on every side. 
The heavens seemed to bow and come down, 
and rocks to break in pieces, and the mount- 
ains to flow at Jehovah's presence." His were 
sermons needed in that day of degeneration, 
and greatly blessed of God were they in raising 
the whole standard of moral thought and action 
among the English people. Take his doctrine 
of salvation — how fitted both to arouse and 
to comfort the masses of people that flocked 
to hear his message! — "By salvation I mean, 
not barely deliverance from hell or going to 
heaven, but a present deliverance from sin; a 
restoration of the soul to its primitive health, 
its original purity ; a recovery of the divine 
nature, the renewal of our souls after the 
image of God in righteousness and true holi- 
ness, in justice and mercy and truth. This 
implies all holy and heavenly temper, and, by 
consequence, all holiness of conduct." It was 
only such plain, practical, apostolic preaching 
as this that could cleanse, sweeten, sanctify 
the impure hearts and debased lives which 



no John Wesley. 

the days of Queen Anne presented. Of John 
Wesley we may say, as Tennyson of the Iron 
Duke: 

"He was rich in common sense; 
And, as the great only are, 
In his simplicity sublime. 
To such a name for ages long, 
To such a name 

Preserve the broad approach of fame, 
And ever-ringing avenues of song." 

In 1740, Wesley appears the intelligent, 
fearless champion of free grace. 

"He saw through life and death, through good and ill, 
He saw through his own soul ; 
The marvel of the everlasting will, 

An open scroll, 

Before him lay." 

With his great soul he proclaims to all around 
the wondrous grace of an Infinite God. For 
ages this subject had been the occasion of 
great controversies in the Christian Church. 
It now rends the evangelical society into two 
distinct parties — Whitefield at the head of the 
Calvinists ; Wesley at the head of the Armin- 
ians. Wesley condemns unsparingly the Cal- 



John Wesley. hi 

vinistic doctrine of election, pretention, pre- 
destination, and reprobation. Says he, boldly: 
"The sense of all this is plainly this — that, 
by virtue of an unchangeable, irresistible dec- 
laration of God, one part of mankind is infal- 
libly saved, and the rest infallibly damned; it 
being impossible that any of the former should 
be damned, or any of the latter should be 
saved." Not satisfied with this stirring ex- 
pression, Wesley publishes in full his sermon 
on "Predestination." Whitefield, aggrieved 
and distressed at its publication, makes reply 
to it. The relation of the two good men be- 
comes strained and unpleasant. Separated in 
sentiment, they soon become separated in 
work. John Wesley, with his brother, de- 
votes himself to the propagation of his views 
and the development of his plans. Societies 
are formed in every direction throughout Eng- 
land, as the evangelist proclaims everywhere 
the truth of God as it appeared to his thought- 
ful, prayerful spirit, his favorite expression 
being that which is immortalized in the me- 
morial tablets erected to the Wesleys in West- 
minster Abbey, "I look upon the world as 



ii2 John Wesley. 

my parish" — a sentiment which his religious 
descendants seem to have adopted, as they, 
aggressive pioneers of the Christian faith, 
bear the gospel in triumphant joy to all parts 
of the world. In 1770 the new Methodist 
society numbers 29,406 members, with 121 
preachers in fifty circuits, the fiftieth being 
in North America, where four preachers are 
actively at work. At the time of Wesley's 
death — 1791 — the number of this body is 
71,460 in the Old World and 41,680 in the 
New; while to-day this Christian force, de- 
veloped into organized Churches, has through- 
out the world, as has been said, no fewer than 
five million constituents. 

Are we surprised at such a growth from 
such a small beginning. Even eliminating 
the divine factor in this evangelical move- 
ment, the human factor in Wesley was mighty. 
Who was this man John Wesley? "The man 
who made more of his university career than 
Goethe; who became familiar with the best 
theology of his day; who translated Bengel's 
Notes fifty years before Carlyle translated 
Wilhelm Meister; who was so familiar with 



John Wesley. 113 

the New Testament in the original that if 
ever a passage escaped him in English he 
could recall it in Greek; who inspired White- 
field to become the greatest orator and Charles 
Wesley to become the greatest hymn-writer, 
Fletcher the most saintly controversialist, 
Watson the greatest theologian, and Adam 
Clarke the most renowned commentator, of 
their age; the man who represented Chris- 
tianity, preaching a salvation and inaugu- 
rating an evangelism which reformed drunk- 
ards, thieves, worldlings, transformed England's 
society, and is to-day spreading over the globe. 
Such a man is not to be ranked low as 
thinker, philosopher, preacher, reformer." It 
is the opinion of Lord Macaulay that Wesley 
possessed a genius for organization and govern- 
ment which might be placed alongside that of 
Richelieu, and not suffer from the comparison. 
After Wesley's death, Methodism continues 
to grow. As the beautiful medallion which 
bears the portraits of Charles and John Wes- 
ley puts it, "God buries the worker, but car- 
ries on the work." And we have faith to be- 
lieve that, with the presence and power of his 

8 



ii4 John Wesley. 

own Divine Spirit, he will continue to carry 
on this work until the kingdoms of this world 
shall become the kingdoms of our L,ord, and 
the knowledge of God covers the earth as the 
waters cover the great deep. 

"I shot an arrow into the air, 
It fell to earth, I knew not where; 
For so swiftly it flew, the sight ' 
Could not follow it in its flight. 

I breathed a song into the air, 
It fell to earth, I knew not where; 
For who has sight so keen, so strong, 
That it can follow the flight of a song? 

Ivong, long afterward, in an oak, 
I found the arrow, still unbroke ; 
And the song, from beginning to end, 
I found again in the heart of a friend." 

But while at the head of this society, Wes- 
ley still remained a staunch, firm adherent of 
the Church of England. Though an Evan- 
gelical, he was yet a Churchman. "The re- 
semblance of his doctrines," writes another, 
"to those of modern High Anglicans is, in 
most parts, exceedingly striking. He had 
early and also forenoon service every day; he 



John Wesley. 115 

divided the morning service, taking the Iyitany 
as a separate service; he inculcated fasting, 
confession, and weekly communion; he re- 
fused the Lord's Supper to all who had not 
been baptized by a minister especially or- 
dained; he insisted on baptism by immersion; 
he rebaptized the children of Dissenters; he 
refused to bury all who had not received 
Episcopal baptism." In 1745, when urged to 
separate himself from the Church of England, 
he writes: "We believe it would not be right 
for us to administer either baptism or the 
Lord's Supper unless we had a commission 
so to do from those bishops whom we appre- 
hend to be in a succession from the apostles." 
But the separation of the two organizations 
was ultimately inevitable. In this new so- 
ciety there was so much of vitality, spiritu- 
ality, and, consequently, power, that it could 
not long remain incased within an organization 
where form and ritualism were so preponder- 
ating an element. It must break old fetters, 
and rise in the glory of a new existence and 
a God-honoring career. The death of Wesley 
opened up the way for complete independence. 



n6 John Wesley. 

and, by degrees, strong organization. And 
this death of Wesley's came on March 2, 1791. 
An affecting death it truly was—Wesley re- 
peating triumphantly, as his last words, "The 
best of all is, God is with us;" a minister 
present reading impressively, "Lift up your 
heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye 
everlasting doors, and this heir of glory shall 
come in;" and all the friends around the 
death-bed singing the notes of the victorious 
psalm, — 

"Waiting to receive thy spirit, 
L,o! the Savior stands above; 
Shows the purchase of his merit, 
Reaches out the crown of love!" 

Is this death? Call it rather a transmi- 
gration, an exodus, to a fairer land. Emi- 
gravit — he has emigrated. Nay, rather, as 
the Master would say, he sleepeth. 

"Death is another sleep. We bow our head 
In going out; and enter straight 
Another golden chamber of our King, 
Larger than this we have, and lovelier." 



V. 

JONATHAN EDWARDS. 

"A man of wisdom and knowledge." 

— Proverbs xxviii, 2. 

IN his well-known and highly prized his- 
tory of the United States, the most dis- 
tinguished of American historians has intro- 
duced one of his best discussions with this 
sentence: "He that would know the workings 
of the New England mind in the middle of 
the last century, and the throbbings of its 
heart, must give his days and nights to the 
study of Jonathan Edwards." More even 
than this eulogy of Bancroft may be intelli- 
gently and emphatically affirmed. He that 
would fully apprehend the growth and prog- 
ress of New England Congregationalism, in- 
deed the history of the development of re- 
ligious thought throughout all America during 
the last one hundred and fifty years, must 
make earnest, critical investigation into the 

philosophical mind and far-reaching influence 

117 



n8 Jonathan Edwards. 

of the great Northampton scholar, thinker, 
preacher, and reformer. 

It may be extravagance on the part of 
Robert Hall to pronounce Edwards "the 
greatest of the sons of men," but just and 
deserving is the eulogium of Dr. Chalmers, 
when he writes: U I have long regarded him 
as the greatest of theologians, combining, in 
a degree that is quite unexampled, the pro- 
foundly intellectual with the devotedly spirit- 
ual and sacred, and realizing in his own per- 
son a most rare yet most beautiful harmony 
between the simplicity of the Christian pastor 
on the one hand, and, on the other, all the 
strength and prowess of a giant in philos- 
ophy." To examine into the life and times 
of such a character presents a study as full of 
fascinating interest as of helpful instruction. 
To this study we shall strictly confine our 
present thought, attempting no analysis, in- 
teresting though it might be, of the magnifi- 
cent philosophical and theological works of 
the profound thinker — which analysis is more 
appropriate in other places than in a popular 
discourse — his writings on Original Sin, Ideal- 



J ON A THAN ED WARDS. 1 1 9 

ism, Human Will, Calvinism, Agnosticism, and 
other great subjects with which he so success- 
fully grappled. 

Jonathan Edwards was born in Hast 
Windsor, Connecticut, October 5, 1703 — the 
year that gave to the world John Wesley ; 
and the century that produced Benjamin 
Franklin, developed Bishop Butler and White- 
field, and recorded the death of Leibnitz. He 
came upon the stage of action fifty years 
after Descartes had died, about fifteen years 
after the accession of William and Mary, and 
during the reign of Queen Anne. 

He presents in himself a striking illustra- 
tion of the mighty force and influence of 
heredity. As far as we are able to trace his 
ancestry, both through Welsh and English 
branches of the family, we find it constituted 
of men and women of high religious culture, 
fine intellectual power, and solid worth in 
their various vocations. Edwards owed much 
to his father, who was a man of rare scholar- 
ship and learning ; but, like many other great 
men, vastly more to his mother, who is rep- 
resented to us as a woman, "tall, dignified, 



120 Jonathan Edwards. 

commanding in appearance, affable and gentle 
in her manner, and regarded as surpassing 
her husband in native vigor of understand- 
ing." It is here the m old and oft-repeated 
story of the imperishability of maternal influ- 
ence and power. Napoleon used to say that 
the future good or bad influence of a child 
depends entirely upon the mother, and that 
''France needs nothing so much to promote 
its regeneration as mothers. " The famous 
Gracchi were prouder of the fact that they 
were the sons of Cornelia, than that their 
mother was a descendant of Scipio Africanus. 
In the library of Webster's old home at Marsh- 
field hangs to-day an old silhouette profile, 
just opposite an elegant painting of Ashbur- 
ton, and under it, written in Webster's own 
hand-writing, the loving designation, u My 
Honored Mother." It was more to the great 
statesman to bow before his mother than to 
stand before kings. A short time before the 
death of John Quincy Adams, an intimate 
friend said to him: " Having read the pub- 
lished letters of your mother, I now know 
who it is that largely made you what you 



Jon a than Ed wards. i 2 1 

are." "Yes," replied Adams, his eye flashing 
bright, and his face glowing with a beautiful 
smile, "all that is good in me I owe to my 
mother." God be praised for the mothers 
that so tearfully and prayerfully sow in their 
children's hearts the seeds that bring forth 
the fruit of noble manhood and lovely wo- 
manhood ! 

As a child, Jonathan, the only son in a 
large family of eleven children, was noted for 
his remarkable mental precociousness. It is 
the testimony of his most careful and elab- 
orate biographer that, when only twelve years 
of age, this boy composed a treatise on the 
soul, the main trend of which was to show 
the absurdity of materialism and the superi- 
ority of spirit to matter. At the age of 
thirteen years he matriculated as a Yale Col- 
lege student; though, in passing, it may be 
said that the curriculum at Yale at that time 
was far inferior to what it is to-day. At the 
age of seventeen years he graduated from this 
institution, bearing away the honors of his 
class; and deservedly so, we judge, as the 
rector of the college makes special mention 



122 Jonathan Edwards. 

of him as a student of " promising abilities 
and great advance in learning." The youth's 
precocity appears as pronounced and remark- 
able as that of James Watt, solving, at the 
age of six years, a geometrical problem ; or of 
Benjamin Franklin, helping edit, when only 
fourteen years, the New England Courant; 
or of Bryant composing, at fifteen years, 
"The Embargo;" or of Madame De Stael, 
deep in philosophy, as one of her biographers 
tells us, when other children of her age were 
playing with dolls. A great, broad mind like 
Edwards's dives into philosophical thought 
even when the boy is just emerging from 
childhood. 

It was in early life that Edwards heard 
and heeded a call to his distinctive life-work, 
as a thinker and writer. When only fourteen 
years old he centered his thought on Eocke's 
profound treatise on the "Human Understand- 
ing," spending hours after hours in copying 
from it as he mastered it; thus illustrating, in 
one sense at least, Bacon's apothegm, that 
writing makes an exact man. How much 
Edwards's "Treatise on the Freedom of the 



Jonathan Edwards. 123 

Will" owes to Locke's " Essay on the Human 
Understanding," every careful student of these 
two master productions recognizes. Edwards's 
" Notes on the Mind," written when a mere 
boy, is a marvelous composition, resembling, 
both in character and reach of thought, John 
Stuart Mill's and Hume's discussions on sim- 
ilar subjects. It was before he was sixteen 
years old that he prepared his H Notes on 
Natural Science," which survive, and are con- 
sulted even to-day. Edwards's precocity re- 
minds us of Dryden, who read Polybius at 
the age of twelve years; or of Mozart, who, 
when in his twelfth year, could reproduce 
with accuracy a mass he had heard the day 
before in the cathedral; or of Pascal, who, at 
thirteen years of age, could compose a treatise 
on Conic Sections. How early life-calls come 
to men! How true the poet's lines: 

"What the child admires, 
The youth endeavors, and the man acquires." 

And beneath all this young student's in- 
vestigations there is always discoverable sober, 
serious thought upon the Infinite and the 
Eternal, his ideas at different times recalling 



124 Jonathan Edwards. 

those of Plato, of Spinoza, of Berkeley. As 
one of the authors of " American Religious 
Leaders " well puts it: " Although Edwards 
came to his intellectual maturity before his 
religious experience had developed into what 
he called conversion, yet his intellect was 
bound from the first to the idea of God. At 
times he seems as if almost losing himself in 
the realm of pure speculations; but the under- 
lying motive in his l Notes on Mind ' or 
' Science ' is theological, not philosophical. 
The religious impulse may appear fused with 
the intellectual activity, yet it is always there, 
and always the strongest element in his 
thought. Science and metaphysics do not 
interest him as ends in themselves, but as 
subordinated to a theological purpose. The 
God-consciousness was the deepest substratum 
of his being, his natural heritage from Puri- 
tan antecedents coloring or qualifying every 
intellectual conviction he attained." To him 
all life is valuable, because a product of Deity, 
and a child of his care and love; and his 
soul, as another beautifully says, revels in the 
mystery of the Divine existence, and grows 



Jonathan Edwards. 125 

into the knowledge of the majesty and glory 
of God. 

Nor was this growth without a struggle. 
When between the ages of seventeen and 
twenty-two years, Edwards seems in agony to 
know, with something like certainty, duty to 
God, to man, to himself. Twenty years after 
these experiences he refers thus to his condi- 
tion at that time: "I made seeking salvation 
the business of my life." How intensely he 
felt on these great questions that confront a 
human soul when it first awakes to conscious- 
ness and feels those inarticulate longings 
which can neither be repressed nor slighted, 
may be revealed in the fact that his favorite 
passage from the Psalms at this period of his 
life was these words of David: "My soul 
breaketh for the longing it hath; my soul 
waiteth for the Lord more than they that 
wait for the morning." His soul-struggles at 
this time remind us of those of Frederick W. 
Robertson and of John Foster. He agonizes 
for light, until at last it breaks through the 
dome-window of Jehovah's Revelation, and 
he is satisfied. How tenderly, touchingly, he 



i26 Jonathan Edwards. 

tells of his new-found joy! " After this, my 
sense of divine things gradually increased, and 
became more and more lively, and had more 
and more of inward sweetness. The appear- 
ance of everything altered; there seemed to 
be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast of divine 
glory in almost everything. God's excellency, 
wisdom, purity, love, seemed to appear in 
everything — in sun, moon, stars; in clouds 
and blue sky; in the grass and flowers and 
trees; in the water and all nature." Such 
visions and emotions as these led to his far- 
famed resolutions, which read: "I solemnly 
dedicate myself to God; giving up myself 
and all I have to God ; to act as one who has 
no right to himself in any respect; to take 
God for my whole portion and felicity, look- 
ing on nothing else as any part of my happi- 
ness, nor acting as if it were; his law the 
constant rule of my obedience, I engage to 
fight with all my might against the world, the 
flesh, and the devil to the end of my life." 
We think more of Thomas a Kempis than of 
Jonathan Edwards when we read and analyze 



Jonathan Edwards. 127 

these strong declarations of self-abnegation 
and consecration. 

And grand, glorious opportunities were pre- 
sented at the time for the cultivation of his 
religious disposition and powers. On Febru- 
ary 15, 1727, at the age of twenty-four years, 
"tall, slender, six feet high, of great serious- 
ness and gravity of manner," he was ordained 
to the Christian ministry of Northampton, 
where he served as pastor with his distin- 
guished grandfather, the Rev. Solomon Stod- 
dard. It was another case of Paul and Tim- 
othy. How deeply impressed young Edwards 
was with his venerable ancestor may be 
learned from his description of him as a "very 
great man, of strong powers of mind, of great 
grace and great authority, of a masterly coun- 
tenance, speech, and behavior." He must 
have been a man on the. majestic order of 
Punshon or Beecher. The officers and leaders 
of Northampton, we are told, "imitated his 
manners, and thought it an excellency to be 
like him ; esteemed all his sayings as oracular, 
and looked upon him almost as a sort of deity; 



128 Jonathan Edwards. 

while the Indians of the neighborhood, in- 
terpreting this admiration in their own way, 
spoke of Mr. Stoddard as 'the Englishman's 
God."' 

Difficult as it was to be the coadjutor or 
the successor of this mighty man of God, 
young Edwards appears determined to be 
worthy of association with him. Fired with 
a holy zeal, he devoted almost his whole time 
to study and thought. It was not unusual 
for him to study thirteen hours a day, a prac- 
tice adopted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in re- 
gard to painting for many years; and may 
not this explain how Jonathan Edwards be- 
came the greatest thinker of his day, even as 
Joshua Reynolds was the greatest artist of 
his time? 

"The heights by great men reached and kept, 
Were not attained by sudden flight; 
But they, while their companions slept, 
Were toiling upward in the night." . 

It was this earnest studiousness, combined 
with natural ability, which imparted to this 
genius and scholar a power of mind which so 
distinguished a man as Sir James Mcintosh 



Jonathan Edwards. 129 

declares to be perhaps unmatched, certainly 
unsurpassed, among men. And yet, in that 
genuine modesty which universally attends 
true merit, Edwards describes himself as pos- 
sessed of "a constitution, in many respects, 
peculiarly unhappy; attended with flaccid 
solids — vapid, sizy, and scarce fluids, and a 
low-tide of spirits, often occasioning a kind 
of childish weakness, and contemptibleness of 
speech, manner, and demeanor.'' Edwards's 
characteristic genuine thoughtfulness revealed 
itself in public, where his manner was al- 
ways exceedingly quiet. He had the bear- 
ing of Bourdaloue — nothing explosive, erratic, 
wild — everything gentle, dignified, reverential ; 
indicating a man of seriousness, research, deep, 
profound thought. Great volcanoes of emotion 
burned in his bosom, but only Edwards knew 
of the heat and power of the flame. 

Thus magnificently equipped for his work, 
our subject entered upon it with a calm en- 
thusiasm. Necessary to an understanding of 
his sermons, which, though open to criticism, 
have in some directions been too severely 
condemned, must be a consideration of the 

9 



x 3° Jonathan Edwards. 

circumstances that tended to shape and mold 
his religious ideas, and their fearless, even if 
not always judicious, expression. First, there 
was the influence of this grandfather, Solomon 
Stoddard. This aged minister prepared a 
work, entitled U A Guide to Christ," in which 
were questions which the young pastor found 
himself pondering, but which no mortal could 
answer. As you hear them, taken from this 
" Guide," you are impressed with them as 
deeply colored by the Puritanism of that day 
and section: Does God work a preparation in 
the soul before it goes to faith in Christ? 
Should men encourage means as an aid in 
conversion? How can God be the author of 
conversion, and yet man have part in it? Are 
divine decrees consistent with human will? 
What is the unpardonable sin? Does and 
should God hear the prayers of the unsaved? 
Such queries as these, which the practical 
Christianity of our day considers hardly 
worthy of discussion, were emphasized and 
discoursed upon with all the fervor of ancient 
rabbis and all the subtleties of mediaeval 
schoolmen. 



Jonathan Edwards. 131 

Again, scan the condition of the country 
at large in Edwards's time. There was an 
unusual prevalence of those three vices which 
sap the foundation of personal character and 
social stability — irreverence, intemperance, and 
immorality — each of which, it would seem, 
was holding high carnival throughout North- 
ampton. And the state of the Churches, also, 
was lamentable in the extreme. "It was a 
period of decline and of deterioration; of 
many attempts at reform, which only ended 
in failure. The spread of the delusion about 
witchcraft, with its attendant horrors, was 
only possible at this dark hour, with its mor- 
bid, superstitious fears. So far as it was be- 
lieved that God, for some mysterious reason, 
had withdrawn his favor, so far, also, was it 
possible to believe that restraint was removed 
from the enmity of evil spirits, that demons 
were allowed to ravage the community at will. 
The witchcraft delusion would have been im- 
possible a generation earlier or later. It was 
the culmination of the fears and misgivings 
which had long been gathering momentum for 
some such tangible outbreak." All this, and 



132 Jonathan Edwards. 

the general and increasingly emphatic denial 
of snch fundamental Biblical tenets as the 
Trinity, the Atonement, Justification by Faith, 
and the future retribution of the unregener- 
ated soul. 

At such a time as this, Jonathan Edwards 
appeared, raised up of God to do his peculiar 
work as surely was Athanasius to battle with 
Pelagianism and Luther with Romanism. 
An opportunity was afforded, in 1 731, to in- 
troduce his work with marked and marvelous 
effects. He was invited at this time to be- 
come one of the public lecturers in Boston. 
He chose for his theme, u God Glorified in 
Man's Dependence" — just the theme for such 
a mind as his to revel in and illumine. He 
delivered it with fervor, enthusiasm, unusual 
effect. It was asked for publication, and may 
be found in the Worcester edition of his works. 
Boston clergy rallied about the young preacher, 
declaring that they had " found him to be a 
workman that needed not to be ashamed, de- 
spite his youth ; thanked the Great Head of 
the Church who had been pleased to raise up 
such men for the defense of the gospel; and 



Jonathan Edwards. 133 

congratulated the happy Church at Northamp- 
ton, on whom providence had bestowed such a 
rich gift." 

A look farther gives us other pictures. It 
is when this mighty intellect grappled — with 
weird imagination, and even revolting figures — 
with such questions as "Wicked Men Useful 
in their Destruction Only," and "Sinners in 
the Hand of an Angry God." We shudder 
as we read these terrible productions, having 
some basis in fact, but with no excuse, it ap- 
pears to us, for the manner of portrayal: u On 
one hand, humanity, hating, resisting, defying 
God ; on the other, God, exerting the might 
of omnipotence to hold humanity in check, 
until the moment comes when he lets go his 
hold, and precipitates the quivering mass of 
angry, boiling hatred into the glowing fires of 
an endless hell." While we believe in a hell, 
/as God's Word teaches it, and in the endless- 
ness of its retribution, we are not surprised 
that, in view of such pictures as Edwards 
gives, the doctrine, sad and sorrowful, should 
be interpreted by many minds as the very 
essence of a God of hatred. "I think," writes 



134 Jonathan Edwards. 

one, "that a person of moral sensibility, alone 
at midnight, reading that awful discourse 
['Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God'], 
would well-nigh go crazy. He w 7 ould hear 
the judgment trump, and see the advancing 
heaven, and the day of doom would begin to 
mantle him with its shroud.'' We do not 
wonder that, under its terrific avalanche of 
logic and imagination, a brother minister in 
the pulpit exclaimed, in almost terror, "Mr. 
Edwards! Mr. Edwards! is not God merciful 
too?" and that hundreds of people in the 
pews wept, groaned, trembled, and were con- 
vulsed with inexpressible emotion. The 
mighty preacher was fired with enthusiasm, 
and the degenerate day in which he lived was 
conscious of its degradation and sin. 

But as justly subject to criticism as were 
these sermons of Edwards, God so blessed 
them as to make them the mightiest instru- 
mentality in the production of what is known 
as "The Great Awakening of 1735." "In 
the latter part of December, 1734," writes 
Edwards, "the Spirit of God began extraor- 
dinarily to set in and wonderfully to work 



Jonathan Edwards, 135 

amongst us. The town seemed to be full of 
the presence of God. It was never so full of 
love and so full of joy, and yet so full of dis- 
tress, as it was then." And the results were 
of the most commendable and practical char- 
acter. Honesty, integrity, and truthfulness 
abounded as never before in Northampton. 
Vice was renounced, and virtue cultivated. 
Great throngs of people united with Ed- 
wards's Church — one hundred one day, sixty 
another day, and over three hundred in a few 
months. It is more delightful to tell of all 
this than of the sad reaction that followed in 
1737, when, as Edwards sadly puts it, u God 
seemed gradually to withdraw from us; and 
Satan, let loose, raged among us in a dreadful 
manner." Nor shall we spend any length of 
time in telling of Edwards's sad dismissal 
from his Church, by an almost unanimous 
vote of his people, after so many years of de- 
voted service. We read of Homer wandering 
along the Asiatic shores of the Mediterranean 
Sea, without a night's lodging at times, and 
of Tasso wanting bread, and of Cervantes 
penniless; but no one of these cases presents 



,136 Jonathan Edwards. 

so painful a picture as Edwards, the match- 
less theologian, the faithful preacher, the in- 
defatigable pastor, driven forth from his 
Church and city, as one of the most lament- 
able reactions of the great awakening. 

But the heroic soul complains not; is not 
in the least embittered, though saddened be- 
yond expression. He had learned what the 
poet meant when he sang: 

"Leave God to order all thy ways, 
And hope in him, whate'er betide; 
Thou 'It find him, in the evil days, 

Thine all-sufficient strength and guide; 
Who trusts in God's unchanging love, 
Builds on a rock that none can move." 

And so the good man leaves Northampton, 
with that sweet spirit of resignation which 
breathes in the simple lines: 

"To me remains nor place nor time, 
My country is in every clime ; 
I can be calm and free from care 
On any shore, since God is there." 

What, you ask, occasioned Edwards's sad 
departure from the arena of his marvelous 
usefulness and power in the past? Many 



Jonathan Edwards. 137 

things, among which were chiefly the mis- 
conceptions of genuine Christianity which so 
often follow great revivals, based largely on 
emotion, which misconceptions Edwards could 
not eradicate from the popular mind, and 
which, growing, operated irresistibly against 
his personal favor and pastoral work. To 
this was added a case of parish discipline, in 
which he was antagonized by his people. 
The billows rose higher and higher, stronger 
and stronger, until, on June 22, 1750, after a 
long, faithful service of twenty- three years, 
Jonathan Edwards was "turned adrift, at the 
age of forty-seven years, with a large family 
of children, with no means of support, and 
doubtful if he should ever obtain another 
parish." But God lets no such man as Ed- 
wards long remain idle. After a season of 
rest, retirement, deep, serious study, and of 
some work among the Indians at Stockbridge, 
he was called -to become the president of 
Princeton College. 

He hesitated to accept this position, chiefly 
because he had in mind a work he desired to 
write (History of Redemption), in which 



138 Jonathan Edwards, 

the "three worlds — heaven, earth, and hell — 
were to be the scenes of a grand drama. It 
was to combine poetry and history, philoso- 
phy and theology, the features of the 'Divine 
Comedy,' or the 'Paradise Lost and Regained,' 
with those of the ' City of God.' " His were a 
brain and a heart capable of working out the 
gigantic conception; for this is the man who, 
in years gone by, had written the noted 
"Treatise on the Will," in regard to which 
the greatest Scotchman that ever lived — 
Dr. Thomas Chalmers — says: "There is . . . 
no book of human composition which I more 
strenuously commend, . . . and which 
has helped me more than any other unin- 
spired book to find my way through all that 
might otherwise have proved baffling and 
transcendental and mysterious in the pecul- 
iarities of Calvinism." How mightily could 
Edwards have wrought on the great trilogy 
of Earth, Heaven, and Gehenna, had God so 
willed! But Providence decreed otherwise, 
and the fully equipped scholar went to Prince- 
ton, where he entered upon presidential work 
for only a brief season, passing away on 



Jonathan Edwards. 139 

March 22, 1758, to that great world beyond, 
where all his difficult questions could be an- 
swered, and all his intricate problems solved, 
in the light of a higher science than that of 
earth. Rest, O saint of God, on the bosom 
of thy Sovereign and thy Savior! Thy work 
is done, thy battle fought, thy victory won, 
thy heaven achieved in the presence of 
thy God! 

"It matters not at what hour o' th' day 
The Christian falls asleep. Death can not come 
To him untimely who is fit to die. 
The less of this cold earth, the more of heaven; 
The briefer life, the earlier immortality." 







VI. 

ALEXANDER CAMPBELL. 

"A good man, and just." — Luke xxiii, 50. 

NB hundred and five years ago, last 
September, there was born, in the county 
of Antrim, Ireland, a child whose name was 
destined to be closely linked with one of the 
worthiest Christian bodies. That child was 
Alexander Campbell. In the veins of his 
mother ran the blood of that noblest product 
of French character, known to us as the Hu- 
guenots; the occasion of her departure from 
the land of her nativity being that base act, 
which casts so dark a shadow on French his- 
tory and reveals so clearly the weakness of 
the heartless and extravagant Louis XIV, the 
revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Freed 
from the persecutions of France, the family 
of this godly woman settled in the rich, fertile, 
gently undulating land of Antrim, devoted 
themselves to agriculture, and established 

schools, one feature of which was that the 

141 



142 Alexander Campbell, 

Bible was to be taught in their curriculum, 
prayerfully and systematically — a feature 
which our American commonwealths might 
well sanction and cultivate as one of the 
strongest safeguards of national prosperity 
and perpetuity. 

The whole family of the Corneigles — this 
was the name of Campbell's maternal ances- 
tors — were then devoted and ardent members 
of the Presbyterian Church, attending with 
regularity its services, maintaining with con- 
sistency its rites, and defending with conse- 
crated fearlessness its doctrines. It was at 
this period that Thomas Campbell, then a 
school-teacher and a young Presbyterian the- 
ologian, became acquainted with a member 
of this family, and afterwards, united to her 
in marriage, became the father of our present 
subject. 

• Since one of the most important factors in 
a man's life is to be the son of his father, it 
may be well to look briefly into the character 
and history of Campbell's paternal ancestor. 
We know that his mother was a woman of 
good blood, sterling worth, consecrated piety. 



Alexander Campbell. 143 

Was his father equally worthy? Originally 
this man's father — Alexander's grandfather — 
was an advocate of Romanism; but impressed 
with the unscriptural, traditional character of 
that system, he left it for the Church of Eng- 
land, to which he w T as attached, and for which 
he enthusiastically labored till the day of his 
death, in his eigthy-eighth year. Thomas 
Campbell — Alexander's father — was reared in 
the nurture and admonition of the Church of 
England; but in early life, the subject of deep 
religious impressions, and possessed of a sin- 
cere and earnest love for the Scriptures, he 
in turn abjured Episcopacy as his father had 
abjured Romanism, and united himself to the 
Presbyterian faith. " This his father, a stanch 
Churchman, did not relish, insisting that it 
was the duty of a man, to use the old gentle- 
man's language, "to serve God according to 
act of Parliament." But Thomas Campbell 
thought differently. Says a biographer: " The 
cold formality of the Episcopal ritual, and 
the apparent want of vital piety in the 
Church, led him to desire the company of the 
more rigid Covenanters and Seceders." He 



144 Alexander Campbell. 

associated with them, grew in grace and knowl- 
edge, and became a devoted, fearless, aggress- 
ive Christian. 

It is unnecessary to follow Thomas Camp- 
bell's history further than to say that, with 
deep religious convictions, he entered, as a 
student, Glasgow University, studied medicine 
as well as literature and science, completed 
his literary and scientific studies, entered the 
divinity school, graduated in theology, and be- 
came an authorized and acceptable Presby- 
terian minister. 

It was in the early years of Thomas Camp- 
bell's ministry that Alexander was born. As 
a boy, Alexander had a trait which, strange 
as it may seem, oftentimes portends a success- 
ful life; namely, indifference to books and 
fondness for play. Sir Isaac Newton, when a 
youth, was regarded the dunce of his school — 
was written down by his teacher as an abso- 
lute failure ; and yet it was he who afterwards 
scaled the heavens, weighed worlds as in a 
balance, discovered laws which were unknown 
quantities in science, wrote "Principia," and 
died, saying, with his characteristic modesty, 



Alexander Campbell. 145 

that the secret of his success was his " ca- 
pacity for patient toil." Milton, when a youth, 
was supposed to possess but a single talent; 
but see how this talent aroused others, and 
how at last — as poet, scholar, and statesman — 
he grandly served God, Great Britain, and his 
whole generation. Not quite as unpromising 
as Milton and Newton, and, perhaps for this 
very reason not quite so great, was young 
Alexander; still, he was anything but scholarly 
in instinct. His most popular biographer 
gives this incident as illustrative of his lack 
of studiousness at the age of nine years, when 
he began the study of French: One warm 
day, having gone out in the field to study his 
lesson, he lay under a tree to rest, when, un- 
expectedly, he fell asleep. "A cow that was 
grazing near approached, and, seeing the book 
lying on the grass, seized it, and, before he 
was sufficiently awake to prevent, actually de- 
voured it. Upon making report of his loss, 
his father gave him a castigation for his care- 
lessness (such things were more common a 
hundred years ago than now), and enforced 
the punishment by telling him that the cow 



10 



146 Alexander Campbell. 

had more French in her stomach than he 
had in his head," — a fact which, of course, 
young Alexander admitted, and perhaps re- 
joiced in. 

This experience seemed to teach the youth 
a lesson, which proved to be most salutary 
and helpful. From this time forth he devel- 
oped a remarkably industrious nature — first, 
like Robert Burns, as a field-hand; and then 
as a student. His intellectual nature began 
to assert itself. Life began to assume for his 
youthful mind proportions both solemn and 
momentous; and as in the British House of 
Commons we hear Richard Sheridan, after an 
apparent failure, introducing his speech with 
the prophetic words, "It's in me, and, by the 
grace of God, it will come out of me!" so, at 
this time of his life, we hear Alexander Camp- 
bell, with a great relish for his books, declar- 
ing his life purpose: "If God will help me, I 
shall become one of the best scholars in all 
the kingdom." His memory was marvelous — 
a rich gift to one who knows how to use it, 
but dangerous to one who becomes its slave 
instead of its master. On one occasion, it is 






Alexander Campbell. 147 

said, lie committed to memory, with absolute 
precision, sixty lines of difficult blank verse 
in fifty-two minutes. He became a close, 
sympathetic student of Locke's "Letters of 
Toleration," and one sees, in all his discus- 
sions of Civil Liberty and Religious Freedom, 
how deeply saturated and greatly helped he 
had become by the exalted sentiments of this 
noble Christian thinker and philosopher. 

But more interested are we at present in 
young Alexander's religious training and cul- 
ture than in his intellectual growth. It is 
the presence or the absence of early religious 
advantages that shapes destiny here and here- 
after. Voltaire felt all through life the effect 
of an infidel poem committed at the age of 
five years, and Hume never recovered from 
the deleterious influence upon him of an argu- 
ment against Christianity heard by him in 
youth. Men are largely what their early 
associations are — not necessarily so, but gen- 
erally so. Young Campbell's early associ- 
ations were among the very best — his mother 
a pious, devoted Christian woman; his father 
a strong, stanch, strict, Calvinistic Presby- 



148 Alexander Campbell. 

terian minister. For such an one as this 
father the Synod gave these orders: That he 
should have family worship twice a day, cate- 
chise his children, teach them the duty of 
private devotions and the glory of a godly 
example. Was the discipline severe? Yes; 
but better, far better, the Scylla of Puritan- 
ism even than the Charybdis of Laxity! It 
is just this, largely, that makes the difference 
in character between Nero and Paul ; in re- 
ligious life, between Byron and Montgomery; 
in godliness, between Burns and Cowper. 
"The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of 
wisdom," and this beginning of wisdom 
should be the prominent element in the begin- 
ning of life. 

Trained under these influences, Alexander 
Campbell was being educated for greater 
changes than his youthful imagination had 
ever dreamed. Mighty religious revolutions 
and upheavals were at this time in an incip- 
ient and embryonic state, and were soon to 
be felt as a great tidal wave throughout the 
length and breadth of the kingdom. Just as 
the shock that centuries ago buried Lisbon 



Alexander Campbell. 149 

was felt even in Scotland, so the influence of 
independency, beginning in a small circle, 
was spreading, and was to continue spreading 
until it should bear with tremendous weight 
upon all the thinkers of that period. At the 
head of this movement were four great men, 
strong in brain and in heart: Rowland Hill, 
Alexander Haldane, John Walker, Alexander 
Carson. Each of these had broken off from 
the Church of England, and was now pro- 
claiming, with mighty power, evangelical 
truth, uncovered by human ritual as never 
before since the apostolic days, untainted by 
human tradition as never before since the 
period of its primitive purity. These men 
were essentially, fearlessly progressive. As an- 
other has summed it up, they proclaimed the 
independency of the Churches; they protested 
with vehemence against any inquisitorial au- 
thority by man or Church over human mind 
or conscience; they protested against the 
hierarchy of papal Rome ; they defended them- 
selves against the arrogance of a National 
Church; they taught with vigor and effective- 
ness that the only condition of eternal life, 



150 Alexander Campbell. 

both in this world and in that to come, is 
living, personal faith in a living, personal 
Christ. In short, they placed Christianity 
above Churchism, and asserted the unmeas- 
ured and immeasurable worth of the individ- 
ual soul. Such doctrines were strange for 
that day; not that they were new — for they 
are the doctrines of the New Testament — but 
that they had been buried so long and so deep 
under the lumber-pile of tradition, and covered 
so long under the debris of the ages. Now, 
for the first time, they are being unearthed, 
with anything like a genuine revelation. 
Their unearthing produces an excitement like 
that which attended the ministry of John the 
Baptist, or of Peter the Hermit, or of Savona- 
rola the Reformer. 

Now, as a direct and glorious result of the 
preaching of Whitefield and Wesley, with 
others already mentioned, there was formed 
what was known as " The Evangelical Society," 
consisting largely of Church of England ad- 
herents. To this, Campbell's father united 
himself, and was known far and wide as an 
earnest, devoted worker. Note the changes 



Alexander Campbell, 151 

thus far in the family, each in the direction of 
progress: First, Romanism; then, Church of 
Knglandism ; then, Presbyterianism ; now, 
Independency, or Evangelicalism. It takes a 
genuine man to change his denominational 
relations, and, in the change, advance ever 
nearer to Scriptural truth, and with the satis- 
faction of doing more fully the divine will. 
Thus far the Campbells have unquestionably 
been the subjects of this uplifting experience. 

Passing by that part of Alexander Camp- 
bell's life which deals with his university 
course in Glasgow, his impressions of Dr. 
Ewing's " Rules of Church Government" and 
Dr. Innes's "Reason for Separation from the 
Church of Scotland," we come now to that 
period of his history in which we are specially 
interested — his life-work on the American 
Continent, which he adopted as his home in 
the year 1809, a young man now, just out of 
his "teens." 

The one thing which, at this period of his 
life, appears to have influenced our subject 
more than anything else was the "Declara- 
tion and Address" to Christians, issued by his 



152 Alexander Campbell, 

father — an earnest, manly expression of a deep 
religious conviction. Its last clause, "This 
society " (no Church was at first contemplated; 
that was an afterthought, even as Methodism 
was an unexpected outcome of Wesley's evan- 
gelical methods) — "This society will counte- 
nance nothing as a matter of faith or duty for 
which there can not be expressly produced a 
4 Thus saith the Lord,' either in expressed 
terms or in approved precedent," — impressed 
young Campbell as nothing else had ever im- 
pressed him; and well it may, for it is the 
very essence of the Christian religion, the 
very glory of the Christian body. Talk about 
Christian union! It can never be effected 
save upon this basis: God's Word unchanged; 
from it no subtraction; to it no addition; in 
it no alteration. There is no unity save that 
of truth; and truth, when genuine, is incor- 
ruptible, untransferable, unchangeable, unbuy- 
able by gold, uncoercible by power, unconquer- 
able by authority. 

By means of fidelity to the "Thus saith the 
Lord," Campbell is constrained to make a 
radical change in his views and denomina- 



Alexander Campbell. 153 

tional relations. It would seem that there 
had been changes enough in his family — first, 
Romanists; then, members of the Church of 
England; then, Presbyterians; then, Inde- 
pendents, — but two others still are to follow. 
There were many things in the way of doc- 
trine held by the Independents, to which Camp- 
bell could not agree in the light of Scripture. 
He devoted time and prayer to their investi- 
gation. The more he studied them, the less 
Scriptural they appeared to his candid mind 
and God-loving soul. He was too honest and 
too fearless to occupy long an abnormal posi- 
tion; so at last, in 1810, he comes squarely 
out into the light with this announcement: 
" Becoming disentangled from the accruing 
embarrassments of intervening ages, and com- 
ing firmly and fairly to original ground, let 
us take up things just as the apostles left 
them — to begin at the beginning; to ascend 
at once to the pure fountain of truth; to neg- 
lect and disregard, as though they had never 
been, the decrees of popes, cardinals, synods, 
and assemblies, and all the traditions and 
corruptions of an apostate Church." This 



154 Alexander Campbell. 

position, firmly taken and intelligently main- 
tained, led our subject to the Baptists, whose 
fundamental, distinguishing characteristic is 
not immersion, nor immersion of the believer, 
nor a regenerated Church membership, but 
God's Word as the only rule of faith and 
practice, out of which come the polity and 
doctrines that characterize them. With a 
Baptist Church Campbell united, and that 
too, he tells us, with a sense of privilege and 
pride such as he had never before experi- 
enced. Enthusiastically he expresses himself 
under date of December 28, 1815: "I am 
now an Independent in Church government 
[which is the Baptist doctrine of Congrega- 
tionalism], of that faith and view of the gos- 
pel exhibited in John Walter's letters to 
Alexander Knox [which is the Baptist doc- 
trine of a living, personal faith in Christ], 
and a Baptist so far as respects baptism." 
The fundamental faith of Campbell seems to 
be expressed in one sentence, often repeated by 
him: "Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; 
where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent." 
The supreme aim and purpose of Camp- 



Alexander Campbell. 155 

bell seemed to be "to restore," as be expresses 
it, "the ancient order of things" as it related 
to the gospel and to the Church. "First, to 
restore the Bible to its proper place and au- 
thority — as against the assaults of Rational- 
ists, who deny the possibility of revelation; 
as against the Romish claim for tradition, 
that it is equal in authority to Scripture ; as 
against Protestant creed-makers, who formu- 
late human systems and make them the bases 
of denominational life and fellowship. Sec- 
ond, to restore Christ to his rightful place and 
rank in the Church and in the thoughts of 
men — as against the dishonoring claims of 
Unitarians, who discrown him of his divinity ; 
and the mistreatment of Trinitarians, who 
often disown him as leader under the direc- 
tion of human leadership and party spirit. 
Third, to restore the practice of the apostolic 
Church in the simplicity of worship." 

There is a demand for the emphasis of 
these exalted principles to-day — God's Word, 
the Infallible Oracle of Jehovah ; Jesus Christ, 
in the glory of his miraculous incarnation, 
his spotless character, his matchless teachings, 



156 Alexander Campbell. 

his majestic deeds, his atoning death, his 
radiant resurrection and ascension, and his 
eternal mediatorial pleadings at the right 
hand of God; and the Christian Church as 
Christ and the apostles founded it. 

Though in these character-lectures it is not 
our purpose to discuss in way of refutation 
the tenets of any Church or denomination of 
Christians, still, as we have given Campbell's 
ancestors' and his own reasons for departure, 
first from Romanism, then from Church-of- 
Englandism, then from Presbyterianism, then 
from Independency, it seems proper that, in 
conclusion, we give our subject's reasons foi 
leaving the Baptists, not discussing at all the 
relative worth of his or the Baptists' po- 
sition. 

First, Campbell became dissatisfied with 
the name "Baptist." It carried with it, to 
his mind, a " party designation," and he was 
earnestly for Christian union. He preferred 
the name " Disciple," as preferable, he tells us, 
to " Christian," because more modest and of 
more frequent use in the New Testament. 
And few unbiased minds will deny that, of 






Alexander Campbell. 157 

all the different Christian bodies, the followers 
of Campbell wear the noblest and most mean- 
ingful name. The designations "Christian" 
and "Disciple" each have the sanction of 
Scripture, and that in itself is a mighty argu- 
ment for them. 

More, Campbell appears to have differed 
quite materially, in those far-away years, with 
Baptists in Kentucky, Virginia, and Missouri 
regarding slavery. He unsparingly denounced 
it as "the largest, blackest spot on our national 
escutcheon, a many-headed monster, a Pan- 
dora's box, a bitter root, a blighting, blasting 
curse;" and one can not but feel, as he studies 
those days and the different expressions by 
Campbell and his brethren on the question of 
Negro emancipation, that these discussions had 
more to do than is generally supposed with 
the separation from each other of men who 
then had, and to-day have, so much gloriously 
in common. It is the political as well as re- 
ligious element that must here be taken into 
consideration. True, it was not predominant; 
but, on the other hand, it was not inop- 
erative. 



158 Alexander Campbell. 

Again, between our subject and the Bap- 
tists of that day there arose discussions and 
differences touching "regeneration" and "ref- 
ormation" — not so 'much, we take it, in regard 
to the fact of the thing as about the philos- 
ophy of it. Some of the discussions show 
subtleties worthy of mediaeval schoolmen. 
Better for us that we accept the fact of salva- 
tion, and seek not to fathom its plan. 

Finally, Campbell found himself laying 
more stress upon baptism than his Baptist 
brethren. Hear his words: "Perhaps neither 
Baptists nor Pedobaptists sufficiently appre- 
ciate baptism. . . . When Ananias said 
unto Paul, 'Arise, be baptized and wash away 
thy sins, calling upon the name of the Lord,' 
I suppose he must have believed that his 
sins were now washed away in some sense in 
which they were not before. We confess that 
the blood of Jesus Christ alone cleanses us, 
who believe, from all sins. The water of 
baptism formally washes away our sins. The 
blood of Christ really washes away our sins. 
Paul's sins were really pardoned when he be- 
lieved; yet he had no solemn pledge of the 



Alexander Campbell. 159 

fact, no formal acquittal, no formal purgation 
of his sins, until he washed them away in the 
water of baptism." Such was the position of 
Campbell; and, tenaciously holding that view, 
he organized Churches advocating and prop- 
agating it. And to-day the followers of Camp- 
bell are found all over our land, an earnest, 
God-fearing, Bible-loving body, reiterating 
constantly and fearlessly the motto of their 
most prominent leader: "Where the Scrip- 
tures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures 
are silent, we are silent." 

But we must close our study. As author, 
preacher, debater, evangelist, educator, founder 
of the Bethany College in West Virginia, 
Alexander Campbell devoted his best days 
and energies to the propagation of what he 
believed to be truth, ever showing himself to 
be a good man and just. He died triumph- 
antly in the Christian faith on March 4, 1866, 
among his last words these, in honor of that 
Christ whom he loved so well: "His name 
shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty 
God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." 
Almost with these words upon his lips, and 



160 Alexander Campbell. 

altogether with this inspiration in his heart, he 
ascended to his rainbow home above, there, in 
the circle of just men made perfect, to await 
the arrival of all who love his Sovereign and 
Savior. 

"He sets as sets the morning star, which goes 
Not down behind the darkened west, nor hides 
Obscured amid the tempests of the sky, 
But melts away into the light of heaven." 



I 



VII. 

CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON. 

"A man greatly beloved." — Daniel x, ii. 

F from this Christian temple to-day we 
could, by some magic art, transfer our- 
selves back two hundred years in the world's 
history, and stand, on July io, 1686, in Notre 
Dame, in Paris, we should find it presenting 
a grand and august scene. Within its crowded 
walls are gathered the bravest men and fairest 
women of France. A distinguished statesman 
and heroic warrior has died — the Prince of 
Conde — and his obsequies are holding. The 
orator of the occasion is Bossuet, the eminent 
and eloquent chaplain of Louis XIV's court. 
He stands over the bier for a moment, mo- 
tionless and silent. . He is overcome by the 
grandeur of the occasion and the nobleness 
of the life he is about to portray. At last he 
speaks, and these are the memorable words 
with which he introduces his matchless 

eulogy: "At the moment that I open my lips 

11 161 



1 62 Charles H addon Spurgeon. 

to celebrate the immortal glory of Louis Bour- 
bon, Prince of Conde*, I find myself equally 
overwhelmed by the greatness of the subject, 
and, if permitted to avow it, by the useless- 
ness of the task. What part of the habitable 
globe has not heard of the victories of this 
prince, and the wonders of his life?" 

As the speaker of this hour appears to 
pay some humble tribute of honor to Charles 
Haddon Spurgeon — a prince in a higher king- 
dom than that of earth — the impulse of his 
heart is to reiterate the utterance of the noted 
court preacher; for what part of the habit- 
able world has not heard of the Abraham-like 
faith, the Paul-like activity, the Chrysostom- 
like courage, the Luther-like convictions of 
this mighty man of God, this heroic herald of 
the gospel of Christ. 

In the recent death of Spurgeon there has 
passed from earth the greatest ambassador of 
the Son of God whose voice has been raised 
in the assistance of right and the resistance 
of wrong in our nineteenth century. More, 
the ages to come will recognize in him one 
of the most colossal religious figures of all 



Charles Had don Spurge on. 163 

the Chris tiau centuries. His personal mag- 
netism may not have been equal to that of 
Luther; his eloquence may not have com- 
pared in elevation with that of Hall, or in 
fervor with that of Whitefield; his force and 
fearlessness may not have been tested by 
princes and cardinals as were those of Knox, — 
and yet, in his "combined God-consciousness, 
devotion to Christ, singleness of aim, heav- 
enly-mindedness, and abundant fruitfulness," 
Charles H. Spurgeon will ever stand forth one 
of nature's truest noblemen, one of Jehovah's 
most consecrated servants. 

That this estimate of the great London 
preacher be not regarded extravagant, it may 
be well to weigh a few of the calm and intel- 
ligent, though enthusiastic and exalted, testi- 
monies recently paid this son of man and son 
of God by the representative religious jour- 
nals of our land. Writes the New York 
Christian Advocate (Methodist): "We believe 
him to be the greatest evangelical preacher 
since Wesley, and the most powerful person- 
ality since the Reformation." The Presby- 
terian (Philadelphia): "He was the foremost 



164 Charles H add on Spurge on. 

Calvinistic divine living in our century, and 
was singularly bold and brave in the avowal 
of what he believed to be the controlling 
doctrines of God's Word.' , The Watchman, 
of Boston (Baptist): "It is not easy to over- 
estimate the loss of the Christian Church in 
the death of Mr. Spurgeon. In every English- 
speaking country there are multitudes who 
owe the impulse to a Christian life to his 
spoken or written word. We rejoice that 
God has permitted one man to render such 
splendid service as a preacher of the gospel." 
The Independent (Congregational): "We have 
lost the greatest preacher of his day, one of 
the greatest the world has ever seen. His 
influence has been only good. It is such 
men that are the true successors of the apos- 
tles." The New York Churchman (Episcopal) : 
"The greatest Baptist preacher of his day, 
we might almost say of any day, has gone to 
his well-earned rest. Charles H. Spurgeon 
filled a large place, and left no successor. 
What John Knox was in Scotland, what Wes- 
ley in his day was in England, what Martin 
Luther was in Germany, that has Spurgeon 



Charles H addon Spurgeon. 165 

been to his time and generation. This cent- 
ury has not heard a voice raised for Christ 
with so complete a mastery of Scripture 
thought and language as was exhibited by 
Spurgeon." Nor are any of these encomiums 
finer than that from one of America's strongest 
thinkers and noblest masters of English — Dr. 
Lyman Abbott — when, in the Christian Union, 
he characteristically writes: "The death of 
Rev. Charles H. Spurgeon takes away the 
most notable figure in the Anglo-Saxon pulpit 
of to-day. For nearly forty years he has 
ministered in London to a congregation 
which, during the major part of that time, 
has crowded his immense tabernacle. In that 
modern movement which has constituted the 
Church 'the preacher's force, not his field,' 
Mr. Spurgeon has been a leader, and his 
tabernacle an example and an inspiration. 
No one of the cathedrals of England, with 
all their magnificent equipment, has done so 
much as Spurgeon's unendowed tabernacle to 
inspire faith, hope, and love in the common 
people." 

And does not Spurgeon's beautiful, busy, 



1 66 Charles H addon Spurge ojv. } 

consecrated, Christ-like life entitle him to the 
eulogies pronounced on every hand, irrespect- 
ive of Church or creed? With this life how 
familiar we have become of late! — his birth, 
in the village of Kelvedon, England, June 19, 
1834, himself the son and grandson of Inde- 
pendent preachers; his education at Col- 
chester, where, especially in Latin, Greek, 
and French, he stood high in his classes; his 
few months' training in an agricultural col- 
lege at Maidstone; his tutorship at New- 
market; his conversion, on December 15, 1850, 
under a simple, earnest sermon in a Primitive 
Methodist chapel, at a period of his life when, 
as he expressed it, he was making a hurried 
sail over the tempestuous ocean of free- 
thought; his baptism, at Isleham, May 3, 
1851; his first sermon, that same year, at 
Feversham, from the text, "Unto you that 
believe, He is precious;" the description of 
him at that time, seventeen years of age, as 
"a ruddy boy, with a round jacket, and a 
broad, turned-down collar ;" his pastorate, 
without any academic or theological training, 
at Waterbeach, in 1852; the beginning, in 



Charles H addon Spurgeon. 167 

1854, of his ministry in London; the crowd- 
ing, Sunday after Sunday, of great masses of 
people in New Park Street Baptist Church, 
Southwark, whose seating capacity was twelve 
hundred persons, to hear his fervid, forceful 
messages ; his removal, for want of room, to 
Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall, where, at 
the age of twenty-two, the young preacher 
delivered his sermons to audiences not un- 
frequently numbering seven thousand, "rank 
and title, social splendor, and splendor of 
civic favor flowing into Surrey Gardens;" 
the laying of the corner-stone of the great 
Metropolitan Tabernacle, on August 16, 1859, 
and the opening of the building, March 25, 
1861, one hundred and fifty-five thousand 
dollars having been expended in its erection; 
the growth of the tabernacle membership 
from fewer than one hundred in 1854 to one 
thousand one hundred and seventy-eight in 
1861, and to five thousand three hundred and 
twenty-eight in 1892 ; the Sunday-school num- 
bering to-day eight thousand five hundred 
and fifteen scholars and six hundred and 
forty-four teachers, besides which are twenty- 



1 68 Charles H addon Spurgeon. 

six missions, whose seating capacity aggre- 
gate four thousand nine hundred and thirty- 
five, Sunday-schools and ragged-schools; the 
Pastor's College, with seventy-seven students; 
the Colportage Association, with ninety-two 
colporteurs in more than twenty counties; 
the Stockwell Orphanage, with hundreds of 
little ones loved and cared for, — to say noth- 
ing, in this connection, of Spurgeon's hard 
labor in the matter of authorship of works 
which have been translated in many languages, 
and deservedly gained a circulation of hun- 
dreds of thousands of copies. 

How crowded that forty-two-year period 
with prayer and patience, self-sacrifice and 
suffering, toil and triumph! We can not ap- 
preciate it to-day as we shall in future years. 
We are as yet too near it. Mont Blanc is 
more accurately measured from the Genevan 
lake than from the Chamouni valley. As 
another strongly puts it, it is in the calm and 
unimpassioned assize of history that men are 
justly measured and rightly adjudged. 

And yet, with the survey just taken of the 
great good work of this great good man, 



Charles H addon Spurgeon. 169 

during a life of fifty years and a ministry of 
forty-two years, we may make, even to-day, 
with some degree of satisfaction, an analysis 
of Spurgeon's marvelous power over men and 
for God. 

What were some of the characteristics of 
this heroic man, this matchless preacher, this 
successful pastor? What the explanation of 
his unusual force, his immortal influence? 

In the first place, Spurgeon started life 
with* that great advantage that comes to a 
man from a noble, worthy ancestry. As in 
horses, so in men, blood tells; and true, pure 
blood flowed through the veins of our subject. 
Like Knox, Edwards, Wesley, and many other 
prominent figures in history, the great London 
preacher had back of him the impetus that 
comes from helpful heredity. To quote from 
the present American preacher in the London 
Tabernacle: "He came from a long line of 
pious ancestry on both sides, and of ministers 
of the Word. The faith that dwelt in him was 
an inheritance, and its foundations were laid 
hundreds of years before he was born. He 
was a child of prayer, like Samuel and John 



170 Charles H addon Spurgeon. 

the Baptist. And not until, from the very 
beginning, from the very form of parental 
character, the future child is shaped for God 
and goodness, can we know the full extent to 
which the faith in the holy child dwelt first 
in his ancestry." It was much to the glory 
of Timothy of old to have had a mother and 
grandmother of strong character and marked 
distinction. It was much to the advantage 
of Spurgeon that he was a lineal descendant 
of heroic Dutch Protestants, who, in the six- 
teenth century, fled to England to escape the 
persecutions of the Duke of Alva, and that 
behind him was a strong line of earnest Non- 
conformist ministers. 

Again, this gifted man possessed an ex- 
ceptionally robust physical constitution, like 
that of Charles V, or William E. Gladstone. 
This was a source of immense power to Spur- 
geon. The opinion of a recent philosophical 
writer that the first requisite of a successful 
life is to be "a good animal,'' while likely to 
be misconstrued, contains a large element of 
truth. He is best fitted, all things being 
equal, to confront life's storms, fight life's 



Charles H addon Spurgeon. 171 

battles, and win life's victories, who is able to 
realize Sydney Smith's expressive picture of 
the happy man, standing on God's green turf, 
with head in God's free air, and thanking the 
Maker for the simple luxury of physical ex- 
istence. Such an one was Spurgeon, until 
broken down by excessive labor for the Master, 
eaten up by the zeal of his Father's house. 
His body was a mighty chariot, furnished him 
by nature to bear on to glorious triumphs his 
heroic soul. 

Greatly aided also in pulpit influence was 
the Tabernacle preacher by the possession 
and cultivation of a remarkably pathetic and 
powerful voice — a voice that was marvelous 
in its combination of clearness, softness, and 
strength. It required no exertion on his part 
to make himself heard in the largest hall and 
by six or eight thousand people ; in fact, on 
one occasion, it is authoritatively declared, he 
addressed, in Crystal Palace, twenty-three 
thousand people. "The wonder of Mr. 
Spurgeon's voice grew upon me," writes a 
gifted American author, "the more I con- 
sidered and compared it. He used it with- 



172 Charles H add on Spurgeon. 

out any apparent effort, and it answered every 
purpose of his will. In its utmost violence I 
never heard from it one note that grated 
harshly on the ear. It was virile, but it hid 
in its virile sweetness an effect of womanly 
winningness that was almost pathetic. It 
was an instrument of speech that either 
needed no management, or was so perfectly 
managed that it seemed to need none. It 
was the perfection of nature and art com- 
bined." It was such qualities as these in his 
voice that made Spurgeon, as a speaker, a 
master of assemblies. 

Besides all this, though no fully equipped 
scholar, no learned man, in the highest sense 
of that expression, lacking the logical acu- 
men and intellectual development of such 
men as Calvin and Edwards, the Tabernacle 
preacher cultivated a style of thought and of 
speech which could not fail, in any presence, 
to arrest attention, demand consideration, and 
carry along with it irresistible force. His 
mental characteristics were simplicity, direct- 
ness, spontaneity. His was truth — clear, cap- 
tivating, convincing — and he gave expres- 



Charles H add on Spurgeon. 173 

sion to it in language which none might 
misunderstand or misinterpret. He preached 
a gospel of warning to those who were led 
into moral slavery, and of comfort to those 
who hungered and thirsted after righteousness, 
and that, too, in the plainest Anglo-Saxon 
speech. His style was one of beautiful clarity, 
illumined by striking imagery. For purity of 
style and elevation of thought, few passages 
in English classics surpass the last sentences 
of his last public utterance, at Mentone: "O, 
to be borne through the year on the wings of 
praise to God ; to mount from year to year, 
and raise at each ascent a loftier and yet low- 
lier song unto the God of our life ! The vista 
of a praiseful life will never close, but con- 
tinue throughout eternity. From psalm to 
psalm, from hallelujah to hallelujah, we will 
ascend the hill of the Lord, until we come 
into the Holiest of all, where, with veiled 
faces, we will bow before the Divine Majesty 
in the bliss of endless adoration. Through- 
out this year may the L,ord be with you! 
Amen!" 

And yet this plain, old-fashioned gospel of 



174 Charles H addon Spurgeon. 

Spurgeon, though told in such charming sim- 
plicity of speech, has subjected this noble, 
Paul-like preacher to severe criticism in some 
quarters. An example of the kind of criti- 
cism which unappreciative souls poured upon 
him is furnished by the following production, 
written twenty years ago by an American 
critic of some distinction at that time: u Spur- 
geon is often compared with Beecher. The 
two should be contrasted. They have hardly 
anything in common. Beecher has popular- 
ized preaching; Spurgeon has vulgarized it. 
Beecher's nature is wonderfully opulent and 
productive; Spurgeon's is poor and barren. 
Beecher is prolific in thoughts, fancies, and 
suggestions; Spurgeon is dry, and his words 
are balls, rather than vital seeds. Beecher 
has a philosophy; Spurgeon knows not wdiat 
philosophy is. The vast and continued popu- 
larity of Spurgeon is as discreditable to Eng- 
land as the popularity of Beecher is creditable 
in America. " That critic — where is he to- 
day? Living; but buried, as a thinker, in 
absolute oblivion. Spurgeon — where is he to- 
day? Dead; but in influence, as man and 



Charles H addon Spurgeon. 175 

preacher, rilling the earth, and thrilling the 
very eternities with joy. 

More than this, the prominent figure we 
study this hour was unusually versatile in 
gifts — preacher, pastor, evangelist, editor, au- 
thor, organizer. Strikingly has a recent writer, 
in one of our most widely circulated journals, 
summed up Spurgeon's marvelous combina- 
tions of qualities substantially as follows: A 
voice that you heard with pleasure, and could 
not help hearing; a mind that absorbed knowl- 
edge from books and nature ; an eye that took 
in a wide angle, and saw everything within 
view; a memory that he treated with confi- 
dence, and that never disappointed him; a 
great, large heart, on fire with the love of God 
and of man ; a practical, common-sense way 
of doing things, either secular or sacred; a 
singleness of aim and a transparent honesty 
that made him trusted by everybody. Truly 
remarkable was he in the equipment — phys- 
ical, social, mental, and spiritual. 

But Spurgeon trusted to no natural ability 
for success, but rather to hard work, crowned 
with God's favor. He was as indefatigable a 



176 Charles Had don Spurgeon. 

laborer as Baxter or Wesley. Think of his 
literary work alone, — "Treasury of David," of 
more than three thousand pages, reaching a 
circulation of three hundred thousand copies; 
four volumes of "Sermon Notes;" nineteen 
volumes of "Sermons;" "The Greatest Fight 
in the World;" "The Clew of Maze;" "Spare- 
hour Thoughts;" "Talks to Farmers;" "John 
Plowman's Pictures;" and "The Sword and 
Trowel!" His life was full of consecrated 
energy. His was that true Christian faith 
which finds its sublimest exposition and high- 
est proof in useful, helpful work. 

Especially was our subject facile princeps 
in the matter of organization. It might be 
said of him what Macaulay said of Wesley — 
he was the equal of Richelieu as an organizer. 
Recall the various enterprises he originated 
and fostered, personally and sympathetically: 
An orphanage, which has aided no fewer than 
fourteen hundred children; a college, from 
whose walls already nearly one thousand min- 
isters have gone forth to their life-work with 
the impress of a master-spirit upon them; a 
colportage agency, which has to-day about 



Charles H add on Spurgeon. 177 

seventy-five different representatives actively 
engaged in Christian work; a book-fund, by 
which more than one hundred thousand vol- 
umes have been donated to indigent pastors, — 
to say nothing of the mighty missionary so- 
cieties connected with the , Tabernacle, for 
work in London, in England, and among the 
peoples across the seas. The silent, sacred, 
sanctifying streams of benevolence and benef- 
icence sent forth from these institutions, how 
they flow on in beauty, mingling with that 
holy river which makes glad the city of God ! 
If unevangelical George Eliot was shocked at 
Spurgeon's spiritual preaching, stigmatizing 
it as ''utterly common, and empty of guiding 
intelligence and emotion — the most superfi- 
cial grocer's back-parlor view of Calvinistic 
Christianity," — surely altruistic George Eliot 
should have been moved to praise by this 
good man's generous heart and unbounded 
philanthropy. 

Spurgeon was also a man of strong, sound, 
safe convictions of thought and duty, based 
upon God's Word. Before this trait in our 
Christian hero all others sink into insignifi- 



178 Charles Had don Spurgeon. 

cance. In reference to the Bible it has been 
said: "It supplied him with most fruitful 
thoughts; it enlarged and enriched his vocab- 
ulary; it furnished him with illustrations; it 
suggested to him motives and aspirations; it 
was the unfailing thesaurus of his mind, heart, 
and tongue; his university, his great text- 
book, his whole faculty, his library; a com- 
plete structure, a house-beautiful, with its re- 
fectory, its armory, its observatory, its lavatory, 
its galleries of portraits, its dormitory for 
pilgrims, every need met — food for spiritual 
hunger, fountains of water and blood for 
cleansing, weapons for warfare, windows with 
outlook on celestial scenes, character-studies 
for warning and imitation, and its chambers 
of rest and refreshment for the weary." 

Asked to declare the secret of Spurgeon's 
power, different writers have located it "in 
voice and manner; in felicity and force of 
diction; in pulpit bearing; in the poetic, 
satirical, or humorous features of his dis- 
courses; in his courting the masses of people; 
in his wonderful knowledge of human nature; 
in his organizing genius and centralizing gen- 



Charles H addon Spurgeon, 179 

eralship," — but no one of these things ac- 
counts, save in part, for the deep, ineffaceable 
impress the man has made upon his age and 
generation. Above and beyond all this was 
Spurgeon's unbounded and unquestioned faith 
in God's Word as an infallible message from 
the eternal court. He had no sympathy with 
the fine, intellectual dreamers, who delight to 
attack every precious article in our evangelical 
faith, grind down smooth all sharp Bible defi- 
nitions respecting sin and salvation, evaporate 
sin into an excusable infirmity or a pitiable 
misfortune, reduce responsibility to an infini- 
tesimal quantity, "open wide doors for future 
probation and future restorationism, and even 
weave the shroud for the soul's burial in a 
hopeless grave." All these things he flung 
away from him with a Pauline God forbid! 
For popularity he never sacrificed an iota of 
religious conviction or faith. The old, old 
gospel of the old, old Book, told in the old, 
old way — this was his delight, his strength, his 
inspiration. What words these from his im- 
passioned soul : " God have mercy on the man 
that makes the Divine L,ord a sort of blessed 



180 Charles H addon Spurgeon. 

nobody, brings salvation down to salvability, 
changes certainty into probability, and treats 
verities as mere opinions! As for me, I be- 
lieve in the colossal — a need as deep as hell, 
a grace as high as heaven. I believe in a pit 
that is bottomless and in a heaven that is 
topless. I believe in an infinite God and an 
infinite atonement, infinite love and mercy, 
an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things 
and snre, of which the substance and the 
reality is Jesus Christ." Such convictions as 
these dominated his thoughts, his speech, his 
life, making him less a mere personality and 
more a moral force. The words of Spurgeon 
at the time of the memorable "Down Grade" 
controversy, the Christian world will embalm 
them in its memory; yea, place them, as 
apples of gold in pictures of silver, for the 
gaze and admiration of succeeding genera- 
tions. Hear them: "To us the Bible does 
not merely contain the word of God, but is 
the Word of God. The Old Testament is no 
less inspired than the New. We hold and 
maintain the doctrines of grace — the electing 
love of God, the Father; the propitiatory and 



Charles H addon Spurge on. 181 

substitutionary sacrifice of his Son, Jesus 
Christ; regeneration by the Holy Spirit; im- 
putation of Christ's righteousness ; justifica- 
tion of the sinner (once for all) by faith ; his 
walk in newness of life and growth in grace 
by the active indwelling of the Divine Spirit ; 
the priestly intercession of our Lord Jesus 
Christ; as also the hopeless perdition of all 
who reject the Savior." No eclecticism here; 
but full, rounded, solid, unquestionable faith in 
the Divine Revelation. 

Here, without question, is the secret of 
Spurgeon's power as a preacher. He believed ; 
therefore, he spoke. He believed thoroughly ; 
therefore, he spoke convincingly. This mighty 
faith it was that caused him to preach the gos- 
pel with such mighty force and fire, as, leaning 
with sympathetic heart over vast multitudes, 
he poured out so fervently and pathetically 
soul-stirring appeals. He was a second Dodd- 
ridge, ever saying: " I long for conversions more 
sensibly than for all else on earth. I could 
not only labor for them, but die for them." 
A second Matthew Henry he was, exclaiming: 
"I esteem it a greater blessing to gain a soul 



1 82 Charles H addon Spurgeon. 

for God than to win monntains of gold." 
This is why, as a distinguished educator has 
lately said, " though he has used no arts to 
draw hearers, preached no sensational ser- 
mons, preached no novel ideas, advertised no 
catching subjects, there has been for more 
than a generation no fluctuation of his power 
and popularity, no ebb in the steady tide, no 
variation of his hold upon the people; and 
why, while other great men have died, and 
thousands of their adherents, allied to them 
by nationality or race or creed or work, have 
bewailed the loss of their leader, this great 
man dies, and his death is lamented by mill- 
ions, bound to him by neither nationality nor 
creed, race nor work." This is why the arch- 
deacon of Iyondon, only a few days ago, in 
St. Paul's Cathedral, could declare that, chief 
of all the elements of Spurgeon, was the splen- 
did completeness, the unswerving strength, 
the exuberant vitality, of his faith in God's 
revelation to man through his Son Jesus Christ, 
combined with the width and warmth of his 
zealous love for souls. 

L,ast and best of all, through God's rich 



Charles H addon Spurgeon. 183 

grace and his own determined will, Spur- 
geon exhibited a character which beautifully 
matched and strongly buttressed his doctrine 
and speech. Interblended in his being were 
such attractive qualities as heroism, majesty, 
nobility, purity, sympathy, self-sacrifice; and 
these, revealed in life, presented an image of 
beautiful proportions and after a heavenly 
original. He . was never ascetical, morose, 
pessimistic. He was always sunny, cheerful, 
optimistic. His humor and wit were natural 
and attractive. Speaking once - of the fact 
that his grandfather, father, brother, and two 
of his own sons were preachers, he quietly 
said: "Scratch a Spurgeon, and you will find 
a preacher." We recall the ready; wit with 
which he replied to his mother's statement 
to him that she often prayed for him to be 
saved, but never for him to be a Baptist: 
" The Iyord has answered your prayer with 
his usual bounty, giving you more than you 
asked." His "John Plowman's Pictures" is 
full of humor. Our subject loved anecdote. " I 
wonder," said an old preacher to him, on one 
occasion, " that you can conscientiously tell so 



1 84 Charles H addon Spurgeon. 

many jokes in the pulpit." "You wouldn't 
wonder,'' replied Spurgeon, "if you knew how 
many jokes I know that I do n't tell." The 
speaker recalls an illustration of this trait 
which he himself personally witnessed in the 
Tabernacle pastor. He was addressing his 
students, two years ago, on "Poor Preaching," 
and spoke, in substance, thus: Not far from 
London is a little church, which has had the 
misfortune of having many pastors in quick 
succession. When the last one resigned — 
one of our own boys — he comforted his congre- 
with the words: "I must go; but be of good 
cheer: God will send you a better man than 
I." Upon which tearful declaration an old 
lady in the prayer-meeting arose, and replied, 
in high-keyed voice: "No, no, dear man, do 
not say that; every pastor that has left us has 
said just that thing, and the Lord has sent us a 
worse one every time!" 

Ruskin says: "Rivers, great and small, are 
all alike in one respect — they like to lean a 
little to one side. They have one bank to 
sun themselves on, and another to shade 
themselves under. Great men are like rivers 



Charles H add on Spurgeon. 185 

in this respect. They have a part of their 
lives for work, and another part for play." 
Ivike L,uther and Knox — indeed, most of the 
heroic personages of history — Spurgeon had 
no small measure of bright wit, quiet humor, 
gentle playfulness. He is a striking example 
of the saying, that " the greatest orators, dealing 
with the most somber of all subjects, have 
nevertheless always possessed a strong sense 
of humor, which from time to time brightens 
even the darkest of the thunder-clouds that 
hang heavy around their theological horizon. 
The men who have made thousands weep in 
agonized contrition for sin, have almost in 
the same breath sometimes caused a ripple of 
laughter to pass over their congregations, as 
a ray of sunlight will sometimes glint over 
the waves of a stormy sea." 

The fact is, the man was genuine through 
and through — natural, unaffected, beautifully 
sincere, creating some approach to that ideal 
character which the poet describes as — 
"The white flower of a blameless life." 

No man could have prayed as Spurgeon 
prayed, without a pure heart. His lips 



1 86 Charles H addon Spurgeon. 

taught truth, and his life illustrated it. His 
deed matched his creed. Light is never so 
intense as when reflected; the gospel is never 
so mighty as when exemplified. What the 
world needs to-day, above all else — what it 
cries for and sighs for, and must have or 
perish — is not art, nor science, nor philosophy, 
nor literature, nor railroads, nor steamships, 
nor banks, nor commerce, nor telegraphs, nor 
telephones, but Christly men, like Charles 
Haddon Spurgeon; men who can sincerely 
exclaim, with certain early Christian heroes, 
" We do not speak great things, we do them;" 
men like Arnot, of whom it was said, "His 
writings are good, his preaching better, his 
life best of all." A noble teacher of true life 
is the gifted bard of Avon, when he sings: 

"Heaven doth with us as we with torches do — 
Not light thern for ourselves ; for if our virtues 
Go not forth of us, 'twill be all alike 
As if we had them not." 

No more fittingly, perhaps, can this tribute 
of respect and affection be closed, than in 
w T ords expressed this very month by a gifted 
writer in the Review of Reviews: "It is diffi- 



Charles H addon Spurgeon. 187 

cult — nay, it is impossible — to reckon up the 
world-wide influence which has been exerted 
by Mr. Spurgeon's life and teaching in the 
life-time of this generation. Through all these 
years, ever since he came, upon the eve of 
the Crimean War, down to to-day, when, 
weak, worn, and weary, he ceased to breathe 
on the shores of the Mediterranean, he had 
been as a muezzin on the tallest minaret of 
English Christendom, crying, with a voice 
which rang throughout all the world: "Re- 
pent, believe, and be converted!" Now that 
trumpet-voice is hushed in death. No more 
will pilgrims, from all the English-speaking 
lands, make their way to the great Tabernacle 
reared in the midst of poor and busy South- 
ward His name remains only as a memory 
and as an inspiration; but this memory and 
inspiration we shall cherish, waiting for the 
glad day when we shall stand with our brother 
on the higher levels of God's glorious uni- 
verse. 

"Time's sentries cry, 'Halt!' 

Hark the sturdy reply: 
Be ye lifted, ye gates, 
The Commander goes by!' 



1 88 Charles H addon Spurgeon. 

Pass on, grand Crusader, 
Hearts beat at thy name ; 

Good-bye to thy form, 

And good-morn to thy fame.'" 



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